The old white man has something against gender – but is that a sign of misogyny? Easter Monday’s case seeks the body first, then himself.
White man, white coat: the suspect chemistry teacher Gombrecht (Uwe Preuss).
That’s exactly where the woman lay, the young man explains to the investigators. He points to the jacket in the leaves: “And she was dead.” – “And she screamed,” adds his girlfriend, completely upset. Yes, how now? In the new case from Frankfurt, the corpse is screaming. Is there a dead person at all?
It’s easy to get confused after a night like this. Late in the evening at the gas station on the edge of the forest: the lovers share a bicycle in a beer bliss. Her: “Where are we going?” He: «To my house. My parents aren’t here.” But then the scream from the woods: in the cone of light from the flashlight, a murder seems to be taking place, the young people are frightened and run away, and the next day the jacket is lying in the leaves. And forensics are securing blood.
So much blood that the person who owns the jacket is “almost certainly dead,” according to the forensic investigation. Whereupon Commissioner Brix (Wolfram Koch) exclaims, comically annoyed: «With a probability bordering on certainty? Such a sh. . .» What now, surely dead or not?
Chemotherapy instead of fasting hikes
At least it’s not her mother, according to the adult daughters of the woman who identified Brix and his colleague Janneke (Margarita Broich) as the alleged victim. The mother is on vacation, they explain in a strangely unconcerned way: She’s probably just stuck in a dead spot right now. The inspectors ask whether she drove away alone. “Fasting hiking in the Pyrenees?”, explains the husband (Uwe Preuss). “That’s not for me.”
In fact, he shouldn’t be fasting, but go on chemotherapy. He has leukemia. But the near-retirement chemistry teacher resists the treatment, and doesn’t want to be mothered by his daughter (Odine Johne), who lives across the street. “Leave me alone, you stupid piece,” he bursts out. “She’s been fiddling with me all day.” Yes, sometimes this friendly gentleman forgets himself. His comment on the new colleague at school? ‘A young thing. No idea, but doctorate. You can see where all this gendering is going.”
Suspicious care
Does an angry misogynist with a relevant past reveal himself here? Petra Lüschow, who directs and also wrote the screenplay, spreads signs: “You don’t have to be so massive again,” warns an older colleague. So did this old white man end up killing his own wife? It would be, one thinks, an unoriginal and also implausible twist in this family drama. Because why would the daughters pretend to the police that they had received text messages from their mother after the time of the crime? Because, as Brix philosophizes, “what mustn’t be can’t be.” The inspector is suspicious of the women’s strict care for their father. For him, it looks “more like control,” says the chief inspector. “So stuffy.”
Money matters somewhere. The mother had inherited, one daughter is on a drip, the other scolds: “You can stand it.” Then the first: “It’s not my fault that you never left Mom and Dad’s orbit.” The circle of haze? The dialogues are artificial, the actors don’t have it easy, and the result is an unwanted mystery: is a suspect pretending, or is the actor simply at his limit? And when Janneke explains that she wants to “keep the ball flat” until the body is found, she involuntarily supplies the appropriate phrase for this case, in which first the dead person is missing and then the tension.
Monday, 8.05/8.15 p.m., SRF 1 / ARD.