Crime scene: Murot and the groundhog

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Episode of the series Tatort
Original title Murot and the groundhog
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company
MR
length 88 minutes
classification Episode 1084 ( List )
First broadcast February 17, 2019 on SRF 1
Rod
Director Dietrich Brüggemann
script Dietrich Brüggemann
music Dietrich Brüggemann
camera Alexander Sass
cut Stefan Blue
occupation

Murot and the Groundhog is a television film from the crime series Tatort . The report produced by Hessischer Rundfunk was broadcast on television on February 17, 2019. Wiesbaden commissioner Felix Murot is investigating his seventh case.

action

Chief Inspector Felix Murot dreams of an operation in an alienated version of the traditional crime scene opening credits ; The moment he is shot, he wakes up in bed at home by his cell phone ringing. It is 7:29 am, the caller is his assistant Magda Wächter, who tells him that there is a hostage situation in a bank and that he has to come immediately. He goes to the crime scene, shines through his expertise in bank robberies and explains and regulates the situation for his colleagues with almost arrogant ease. Having penetrated the bank branch alone, he persuaded a hostage-taker armed with a crossbow to give up with just as ease, and shortly afterwards he disarmed her accomplice with a single movement. When he accompanied him and the hostages outside, however, he was shot by the woman he had left unattended. At that moment he wakes up at home again, it is 7:29 a.m. again and he is called for action. He's obviously got into a time warp. There are now numerous other time loops that are very similar, but also have very significant differences. What they all have in common is that Murot dies in the end and is immediately woken up by the cell phone, lying in bed again. He encounters the same neighbors and passers-by, colleagues and criminals and similar behavior, and is killed in a different way each time. For most of his fellow human beings, however, the situation occurs for the first time, and Murot, because of his knowledge and suffering, is increasingly rude and sometimes even more ironic and cynical with colleagues, criminals and passers-by.

After the call, he is first disturbed by the loud thrash metal music of his neighbors in his house , then he meets a jogger with an open shoe who falls in the stairwell, on the street of a mother with a little boy who always says that he would rather live with his father and then run into Murot's feet, and finally a punk who wants to clean the windshield of his NSU Ro 80 at the red light . Then he meets his colleagues on site; There a new colleague pours coffee over his trousers and a labeled paper plane of the perpetrator flies out of the bank towards the officers. Murot invades the bank and, in scenes in which he does not die earlier, meets the hostage-taker armed with a crossbow and the male hostage-taker who keeps other bank employees at bay with explosives in an office room. In an interview with Murot it turns out that the hostage-taker is involved in a custody battle, which could be the trigger for his act. He's the only one who also lives in a time warp and can therefore remember the previous scenes.

In the course of the repetitions, the inspector finds out the name of the hostage-taker: Nadja Eschenbach.

Murot tries to escape this time warp. At first he does not drive to the scene of the incident, but to an excursion restaurant, is caught up with media reports about the case and dies in a head-on collision with a truck. In another loop, he shoots himself out of desperation as soon as he wakes up, but wakes up again immediately, once he throws himself out of a window just because he has forgotten his apartment key and dies deliberately only to wake up again in his bedroom. He buys tools in a hardware store and drives to Nadja Eschenbach's apartment, breaks in and is shot by a police colleague called by a resident of the house. Before that, however, he found the name of the male hostage taker in Eschenbach's laptop: Stefan Gieseking.

In the next loop there is a longer dialogue between Murot and Gieseking, whom he then shoots when he brutally kicks the hostages. Murot offers Eschenbach to leave the branch with her as a hostage and to demand an escape car for both of them. When the police officers do not respond, he shoots her and is then shot himself. In the loop that follows, he finds out that the mother and child he meets in front of his door every day are Gieseking's ex-wife and son, who are separated from their father. He takes the boy to the crime scene in the car and negotiates a deal with the perpetrator. He releases some hostages and is given a getaway car in which he and his accomplice escape. Murot takes up the chase and is rammed head-on by the hostage-taker's getaway car.

Murot is sure he knows a way to escape the time warp: Nobody should die. He persuades Gieseking to trust him, let the hostages go and leave the bank with him. Murot and his assistant had previously been able to convince the chief of operations to withdraw all police officers at least 100 meters from the scene. So Murot and the hostage-taker can get into the car undisturbed and leave the crime scene. They drive around for a long time and have conversations. Shortly before sunset they reach a river, where they relax on the bank. Murot gives Gieseking his weapon and says that he has a choice: he can shoot them both and everything would start all over again - or they survive the loop and a new day would begin the next morning. When Gieseking puts down the pistol, the SEK surprisingly intervenes and arrests Gieseking.

Murot wakes up the next morning and waits for his cell phone to ring, but it remains silent. Relieved, he steps onto his balcony, Mrs. Gieseking walks past down the street with her son, the jogger is standing on her balcony and tells Murot that she won't run today because she overexerted herself yesterday. Murot is now sure the time warp is over and is enjoying the new day.

music

This crime scene was recorded as film music :

The rest of the film music was composed by Dietrich Brüggemann especially for the crime scene and recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra .

background

The title is an allusion to the feature film Groundhog Day , whose idea and construct are taken up again here.

The shooting took place from May 3, 2017 to June 9, 2017 in Frankfurt and the surrounding area. The film premiered on August 30, 2018 at the Festival of German Films .

reception

Reviews

The film received largely positive reviews. Staging, time loop form and Tukur's performance were emphasized. Thomas Gehringer, for example, in an article for Tittelbach.tv, judged the variation in the types of death as enjoyable and the film as a “wonderfully playful reflection on television, which is itself a kind of time warp. But also a serious thriller about the annoyance of everyday routine with the sympathetic message: 'Every day is a gift'. " Christian Buß rated the film at Spiegel Online with nine out of ten points and recommended it" simply as a bloody liberation against the Sunday routine ”without asking about its plausibility. Claudia Tieschky spoke out in favor of the film in the Süddeutsche Zeitung exclusively because "because Tukur plays this madness so insane". Karsten Essen said both in media correspondence and in the film service that the film was a "formally innovative contribution" to the Tatort series and, above all, was well played by Tukur. In the FAZ , Oliver Junge was enthusiastic about the film “about the sheer joy of playing that manifests itself in gorgeous comedy”. Tobias Sedlmaier, on the other hand, was not completely satisfied with the film in the NZZ : The time loop was "only enjoyable in the first third", "the potentially infinite expansion of possibilities can quickly turn into arbitrariness, which ultimately weakens the episode after a furious beginning leaves."

interpretation

The title of the crime thriller already refers to the film Groundhog Day from 1993 as a model. Critics also compared the film with the science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow , in which the protagonist also dies several times before leaving the time loop, and were convinced that the Tatort film was influenced by that film.

Audience rating

The first broadcast of Murot and the Groundhog on February 17, 2019 was seen by 6.88 million viewers in Germany and achieved a market share of 19.4 percent for Das Erste .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthias Dell: "Tatort" Wiesbaden: Or Hans-Dietrich Genscher? . In: time online . February 17, 2019, 9:46 p.m.
  2. The music tracks for the film . In: daserste.de , accessed on February 18, 2019.
  3. ^ A b Christian Buß : The marmot massacre. In: Spiegel Online . February 15, 2019, accessed February 15, 2019 .
  4. Crime scene: Murot and the marmot at crew united
  5. Murot and the marmot (crime scene). In: Festival of German Films. September 2018, accessed December 23, 2018 .
  6. Thomas Gehringer: Series "Tatort - Murot and the marmot". In: Tittelbach.tv . February 19, 2019, accessed February 19, 2019 .
  7. Claudia Tieschky: And the hostage-taker says hello every day. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . February 15, 2019, accessed February 15, 2019 .
  8. Karsten Essen: Dietrich Brüggemann: Tatort - Murot and the marmot (ARD / HR) . In: Media correspondence of February 18, 2019, accessed on February 22, 2019.
  9. Karsten Essen: Tatort - Murot and the marmot (long review) , in: Film-Dienst , accessed on February 22, 2019
  10. Oliver Jungs: Do you know one, do you know all . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 17, 2019, accessed February 22, 2019.
  11. Tobias Sedlmaier: «Tatort» with Tukur: If you know a hostage-taker, you know them all , in: NZZ from February 17, 2019, accessed on February 22, 2019.
  12. Tilmann P. Gangloff : TV tip: "Tatort: ​​Murot und das Murmeltier" (ARD) , in: Evangelisch.de on February 17, 2019, accessed on February 22, 2019.
  13. Fabian Riedner: Primetime check: Sunday, February 17, 2019. In : quotemeter.de . February 18, 2019, accessed February 18, 2019 .
  14. Ludwigshafen Film Festival: Murot- “Tatort” wins the main prize. In: The Rhine Palatinate . Medien Union , September 8, 2018, accessed December 23, 2018 .
  15. 15th German TV Crime Festival Wiesbaden: The Competition Films 2019. In: German TV Crime Festival. Cultural Office of the State Capital Wiesbaden, January 24, 2019, accessed on February 15, 2019 .
  16. The prices for 2019. Baden-Baden TV Film Festival, accessed on December 1, 2019 .