The murderer's village

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Movie
Original title The murderer's village
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2015
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Niki Stein
script Elisabeth Herrmann
Niki Stein
production Regina Ziegler
music Jacki Engelken
camera Arthur W. Ahrweiler
cut Corina Dietz
occupation

The Village of Murderers is a German TV film from 2015 by Niki Stein with Anna Loos and Alina Levshin in the leading roles. The crime film was based on motifs from the novel of the same name by Elisabeth Herrmann .

action

One morning in the zoo in Berlin, the remains of a human body were found in the umbilical pigs' enclosure . The young patrol officer Sanela Beara is on duty that day and has to help Detective Gehring with the investigation. She soon meets the zookeeper Charlie Rubin, with whom she has a lively conversation, but is knocked unconscious shortly afterwards by an unknown person. The police assume it was the zookeeper and Rubin is arrested. Without making many excuses, she admits the attack on the policewoman and the brutal murder of Leyendecker, whom she allegedly drugged with an anesthetic and thrown into the peccary enclosure. The psychiatrist Jeremy Saaler is supposed to create a medical report about Rubin, since it is suspected that the zookeeper has a mental disorder. This is ultimately confirmed by Prof. Saaler and he suspects the reasons for it in Charlie's childhood. That's why he gets in touch with her younger sister, who lives as a veterinarian on a horse farm. He learns from her that they both lived in the Brandenburg village of Wendisch-Bruch until she came to foster parents at the age of six because her mother had died. Her then 16-year-old sister Charly stayed behind and they would not have seen each other all these years. She only met her by chance in the zoo two years ago. Saaler has a hard time escaping the cool charm of Cara Rubin and has an affair with her. His fear of having to give his assessment for the sister is superfluous, because Charlie Rubin throws himself out of the window in an unobserved moment and dies.

Policewoman Sanela Beara does not leave the case in peace, the solution of which with Rubin's quick confession is questionable for her. She later also wants to go to the criminal police and already has a feel for certain connections. During her investigation, she meets with Prof. Saaler, with whom she talks about the case. After this conversation, Beara is sure that Rubin was not the perpetrator, but wanted to protect someone. The theory of a trauma from childhood turns her Rubin into a soul mate, because Beara too has had a hard time with the past when she had to flee from her home country Croatia and lost her mother. Without further ado, she goes on a search for clues and asks the few residents in Wendisch-Bruch who are still here. Everyone is not very cooperative and she is very reluctant to uncover the secret of the Ruby Sisters' past. Even Commissioner Gehring is puzzling over the death of the commercial agent Leyendecker, especially since a colleague of his was killed in a mysterious car accident a few years ago. Someone had spilled manure in a curve, which was the man's undoing.

To find out more, Beara rents a room at the Wendisch-Bruch inn. The landlady advises her to look around the old, abandoned Ruby house if she wanted to know what would have happened here 20 years ago. What she sees there confirms a tip from a villager that this would have been a brothel. Mother and daughter would have served loads of men. But Beara cannot find any men in the whole place, whereupon the woman explains: “They are gone. And who is not gone is in the cemetery. ”In fact, the policewoman finds the graves of four men there who died between 1994 and 1995. She informs Commissioner Gehring about this and now wants to leave the gloomy place first. But it doesn't come to that, because someone shoots her with an anesthetic arrow and takes her to a hiding place, where she wakes up next to old children's skeletons. Desperate, she calls for help, but she is locked in and no one hears her.

Prof. Saaler, who blames himself for not being able to prevent Cara's sister's suicide, has also discovered the family secret. Obviously, Charly wanted to protect her little sister from childhood and her self-destructive behavior stems from experiences of abuse in the past. He travels with Cara to her parents' house in Wendisch-Bruch and hopes that Cara will remember the past. When they want to stop at the inn for a moment, Cara suddenly disappears. Saaler finds a freshly thrown disposable syringe behind the restaurant. He immediately begins to look for Cara and meets Inspector Gehring, who is now also on the lookout, since Beara has disappeared without a trace. He has already researched that Marten Wahl, the son of the inn operator, works at Tierpark Berlin and suspects that this is the killer wanted. Together they can find and save both Cara and Beara, while Marten Wahl deliberately sets off a gasoline explosion and dies in the process.

Marten had always been in love with Charly and to protect her he had killed all the men. He wanted "this to stop at last". At that time he already had to dispose of the newborn babies that Charly's mother had given him. He had met Leyendecker by chance after years in the zoo, which was also his death sentence. Charly knew about it and wanted to protect him.

background

The Village of Murderers was filmed from March 3 to April 1, 2015 in Berlin and the surrounding area, including on the Karlshorst trotting track .

reception

Audience rating

The first broadcast of The Village of Murderers on October 26, 2015 on ZDF reached 6.36 million viewers and a market share of 19.3 percent.

Reviews

Rainer Tittelbach from Tittelbach.tv wrote appreciatively: “One woman confesses a murder, another does not want to believe it, penetrates into the past of the alleged murderer and unearths terrible things. 'The Village of Murderers' is a ZDF Monday film of the dark kind, a worth seeing outlier in the popular crime drama genre with a thriller encore. Niki Stein implemented the strengths of the novel by Elisabeth Herrmann [...] in a dramaturgically stringent and very cinematic way. Headstrong characters. A coherent nightmare mood that is repeatedly broken with a wink. A hit for Blick actress Alina Levshin and Anna Loos is really good. "

The critics of the TV magazine TV Spielfilm gave the film an average rating (“thumbs straight”). They judged: “Is that supposed to be grotesque? In Niki Stein's adaptation of the Elisabeth Herrmann crime novel, everything seems a bit off. The characters, the plot and the staging raise more questions than they answer - and this eastern sadness has meanwhile also become a TV annoyance. "

Michael Hanfeld from the FAZ sums it up: “You shouldn't place too high demands on this film, based on a model by Elisabeth Herrmann, which gives little. The plot is partly outrageous, the psychology of the characters rudimentary and questionable; there are dialogues that nobody speaks unless he or she is in a crime thriller. "

In Quotenmeter.de Frederic Servatius wrote: "Unlike the title it can possibly believe there's at, 'not to see The village of killer one murder after another." "But it is above all the story so wonderful immoral, the escalation but not quite as exciting as intended. ”“ But since the overall structure is resolved and the story […] and parts of the staging are very coherent overall, the production is more than bearable. ”

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The village of the murderers at crew united . Retrieved January 13, 2020.
  2. ↑ a b Rainer Tittelbach : Alina Levshin, Loos, Tarrach, Sadler, Niki Stein & the black soul of a village , accessed on Tittelbach.tv on January 13, 2020.
  3. ↑ TV crime drama about a young policewoman who has a mind of her own. Film review at tvspielfilm.de, accessed on January 13, 2020.
  4. ↑ Michael Hanfeld: There is a corpse in the zoo at faz.net , accessed January 13, 2020.
  5. ↑ Frederic Servatius: criticism of the film at Quotenmeter.de , accessed on 13 January 2020th