In the first few minutes of the new crime thriller from the “Polizeiruf 110” series, the perpetrators, victims and the most important witness are certain. The fact that it remains exciting and highly emotional to the end, and perhaps precisely because of this, is due to the subject and the brilliant performances of the actors in this Rostock episode entitled “Daniel A.”. It runs this Sunday at 8.15 p.m. in the first.
A central character plays the 23-year-old trans man Daniel (Jonathan Perleth), whose real name is Daniela, but feels like a man and wants to live like that. Its story is told in many facets of everyday life. Dustin Loose (director) and Benjamin Hessler (script) manage to do this without overdoing it. At the same time, a new, promising investigator duo can be seen on the streets of Rostock, but they still have to get their act together.
The story: Daniel uses an app to meet 24-year-old Nathalie (Lea Freund) at the “Knockout” club. He wants to “go through” again, to see if women also perceive him as a man. The date ends quickly, you say goodbye at the bar door and go your separate ways. But a longtime friend and stalker is waiting for Nathalie at the parking lot. A fight ensues, she falls, falls unhappily and is dead.
Daniel absolutely doesn’t want to report to the police as a witness because that would mean that his trans story would become public. But he wants to determine the time himself and, above all, spare his father, who is a police officer himself and calls his daughter “Danni”.
For chief inspector Katrin König (Anneke Kim Sarnau) and her new colleague Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann), Daniel is the last person to see the dead woman alive and is therefore a suspect. This is the first time both investigators are working directly on a case. The characters couldn’t be more different. König has been pretty thin-skinned since Sascha Bukow (Charly Hübner) left the team and welcomes Böwe, Bukow’s half-sister, not only reservedly but dismissively.
space for emotions
A second desk fits in perfectly, the new colleague trills cheerfully and carefree when she stands in König’s office for the first time. “Ää, mh, pfhh, uh, no,” says König. Both have to pull themselves together, and colleagues Röder (Uwe Preuss), Pöschel (Andreas Guenther) and Thiesler (Josef Heynert) hope that things will go well. Only once, when Böwe is swaying in the car and singing along to a song, does König unintentionally flash a slight hint of a smile across his face.
The “police call 110” gives the actors room for high emotionality in many scenes. The sister of “Daniel” (Daria Wolf), who only knows him as a sister, became pregnant at 15 and is completely overwhelmed with the baby. “Danni’s” father (Jörg Witte) is also at his wit’s end, calling desperately to the neighborhood: “We are a completely normal family.” The shocked mother of the dead (Katharina Spiering) first tries to suppress the truth until she collapses in the next room.
The embodiment of the positive, on the other hand, is Melly Böwe, who travels to her new job in her old car without central locking and navigation system and with a Bochum number plate. Her reaction when Böwe calls her grown-up daughter at 11:00 a.m., who answers the call yawning but is neither at home nor alone after a night of partying, is absolutely likeable and worth seeing. Böwe is still a long way from such a relaxed relationship with her colleague König.
