Sandra’s husband has disappeared, her child too, and there’s a pool of blood in the bedroom. But Sandra doesn’t seem to care. It soon becomes clear what’s going on – just not for the inspectors Berg and Tobler.
Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Tobler (Eva Löbau) don’t see through the emotionally cold Sandra (Lisa Hagmeister, middle).
Everything is neat here. Pretty new buildings, paths that are straight as an arrow, children riding scooters. Even the weather is nice. The sun floods the lush fields, the wheat sways in the wind. A life in a thoroughly optimized settlement. The vegetable box is brought directly to the door, and the key is just under the flower pot in front of it. Welcome home, welcome to the norm. In normality?
A scream, a pool of blood in the bedroom. where is the husband where the child The case begins without a body, but with a lot of hectic in the supposed idyll. That’s how we know the Black Forest “crime scene”. Inspectors Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Tobler (Eva Löbau) grope in the dark, as the saying goes, although this darkness may be lurking next door. With the mother-in-law who has never liked her daughter-in-law, with the neighbors who are all whispering, turning away. The stare, don’t know what to do and just say: “Sandra is just Sandra.”
The neighbor would like to be Sherlock Holmes
This Sandra, wife of the missing Gerd and mother of the six-year-old Noah, who has also disappeared, sits tensely in a rest stop and looks into space. “An act of violence could have taken place in your house,” explains her inspector Berg bureaucratically. And Sandra: “What does that even mean, an act of violence?” She looks out the window in amazement. no sadness No screaming or collapse?
Sandra sits in the service area and stares straight ahead.
It’s clear to everyone in the settlement that she’s the double killer. Cold-blooded and brutal. One who calmly acknowledges the son’s dinosaur figures lying around and sheds no tears as she stands by the marriage bed with the huge bloodstain. “You don’t stop here,” says the neighbor who lives behind “Isoglas vom Feinsten” and gives laymen Sherlock Holmes: with lists containing the most precise times and activities of their neighbors, written on colorful post-it notes.
How does a person deal with it when they find out that their loved ones may no longer be there? Who are finally found in a well, one rammed in the stomach with a kitchen knife, the other strangled hours later? Isn’t the woman the perpetrator who wanted something bigger in the narrowness of the standardized suburban settlement, but didn’t find it and wasn’t allowed to find it?
Lisa Hagmeister (the overwhelmed mother from «System Crasher») gives strength to her Sandra, this depressed, even oppressed woman who accepts everything without feeling and just wants to be left alone. Strength to stand up to those who always saw her as an outsider, who believed her capable of everything, who judged her.
Plain pattern
In the theme week «We wanted!» ARD wants to explore the question of what defines a society, what holds people together or drives them apart. A “crime scene” called “The Views of Others” is of course a good starting point.
However, the new case is somewhat clumsy and stiffly constructed. It soon becomes clear who must have killed the man and the child – just not the inspectors. A simple, well-known pattern. Nevertheless, the film is worth seeing because the director Franziska Schlotterer, who is not the first to stage a “crime scene” from the Black Forest, is less interested in a criminal case than in the psychogram of a person who is different from his surroundings, even from the family is declared an oddball. A man who loses everything but himself. Sandra just stays Sandra, no matter what the others think of her and what they trust her to do.
“Tatort” from the Black Forest: “The views of others”, on Sunday, 8.05/8.15 p.m., SRF 1 / ARD.