First idyll, then nightmare: A father and his son trudge through the snow-covered Berlin Grunewald. A little later, the eleven-year-old boy is gone, gone. As if he hadn’t been there at all. This is how the film “Der Schneegänger” from 2019 begins, which can be seen on Friday at 9.45 p.m. as a repeat on Arte.
Darijo’s body was not found until two years later; He was murdered. His mother Lida (Edita Malovcic) faints at the news in her salon, her ex-husband Darko (Stipe Erceg) flees from his trailer in the woods. Darko, a game warden, wanted to shoot an allegedly sick wolf in the forest on the day the child disappeared. His son had prevented this by shouting loudly and clapping his hands.
Lida is now married to her ex-boss, for whom she used to work as a housekeeper. Chief Inspector Lutz Gehring (Max Riemelt) is investigating the case. The young police sergeant Sanela Beara (Nadja Bobyleva) is smuggled into the villa where Lida lives with her current husband and two stepsons as a housemaid and undercover agent.
past in Croatia
The director Josef Rusnak (“Beside the Trace”) shot his crime drama based on the book by Elisabeth Herrmann (“Requiem for a Friend”), who also wrote the screenplay together with him. In essence, both stick to the already exciting template. How much the main and secondary characters are connected through their shared past in Croatia is made clear by cinematic flashbacks. The smuggling of Sanela into the suspicious family seems implausible because she already knows some of its members from before.
The actors are all good in their roles, especially Max Riemelt and Nadja Bobyleva. While he, as chief inspector, leads his investigations very solidly and doesn’t seem to have any secrets at all, she shows very clearly how her character of the policewoman with Croatian roots suffers from the loss of her mother. She had been shot dead in her home country by a soldier who bears a certain resemblance to Darko. He is now suspected of having killed his little son. It becomes increasingly clear that the crime against the boy began long before his death.
