Crime scene: The forest is black and silent

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Episode of the series Tatort
Original title The forest stands black and is silent
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company
SWR
length 89 minutes
classification Episode 838 ( list )
First broadcast May 13, 2012 on Das Erste , ORF , Swiss TV
Rod
Director Ed Duke
script Dorothee Schön
production Sebastian Hünerfeld
Sabine Tettenborn
music Christoph M. Emperor
Julian Maas
camera Andreas Schäfauer
cut Isabelle Allgeier
occupation

The forest is black and silent is a television film from the crime series Tatort . The film of the Südwestrundfunk by director Ed Herzog with Ulrike Folkerts and Andreas Hoppe as investigators Odenthal and Kopper from Ludwigshafen am Rhein was broadcast on Sunday, May 13, 2012, on Erste . The sequence of the crime scene deviates from the typical pattern, according to which a team of investigators jointly solve a crime. For the first time, a crime scene was supplemented by an online game that started immediately after it was first broadcast.

action

A mushroom picker has seen a lifeless person at the foot of a rock in the Palatinate Forest and calls the police. Since Lena Odenthal happens to be nearby, her colleague Mario Kopper asks her to go there despite her evening work and she reaches the place in question in the forest on her own. At the alleged crime scene, Lena is knocked down by a young gang and taken hostage. Handcuffed and with her own Walther P99 weapon , she is forced to accompany the young men through the forest. On the phone, Lena Kopper can use a trick to communicate her situation as a hostage, whereupon Kopper organizes an extensive search in the huge forest area. In order not to be followed, the boys throw Lena's cell phone into the wagon of a passing freight train. Since they are distracted by this, Lena Odenthal manages to take the victim's cell phone out of a backpack. First Kopper, Becker and a team look for further clues at the crime scene, but can only find a stone with traces of blood before a storm interrupts their work in the forest. Lena's cell phone is located in the freight yard in Mannheim and the search team goes there. Kopper dials Lena's cell phone number and you can hear it ringing very softly somewhere. A plainclothes policeman from the search team found the cell phone, wrapped in a T-shirt. The search team drove drenched back to the station. There they have all cell phone providers create profiles showing which cell phones have moved in the radio cells together with Lenas. Only Bernd Watzlawick's cell phone has the same movement profile. He is the head of a nearby rehabilitation camp. Lena Odenthal's discussions with her kidnappers and the investigations of Kopper's team reveal the crime with two corpses and their backgrounds.

The gang is a group of six criminal youths from the rehabilitation camp, the Rauhberghof. These six boys each violated the house rules three times and with the "AZOK trip" they get one last chance to stay at the camp. Your supervisor Watzlawick was supposed to push the boys to their psychological and physical limits on this trip. After the apparently natural death of 16-year-old group member Daniel 'Dobby' Deutz, which was caused by physical stress, the boys, by the way, 16-year-old Murat, 18-year-old Sascha, 16-year-old baby, 20-year-old breakdown and 19-year-old Tom killed her supervisor Watzlawick. He had previously filmed the denunciation of the weakest group member by the boys with his cell phone and assigned them the blame for his death. Now the group tries with the pledge, their hostage, through the Palatinate Forest over the border to France to find Tom's brother. Lena Odenthal tries to use the individual, more or less unstable characters for her investigations and of course to escape from being held hostage in a situation that is not harmless for her.

Peter Becker and his team explored the area around the crime scene and found the bodies of Bernd Watzlawick and Daniel Deutz.

The gang spends the night in a ruined castle. You set out again early in the morning. The sun has not risen yet and the moon is still in the sky. Breakdown is a song that fits the situation on the lips. With the gun in his hand he forces Lena Odenthal to the evening song of Matthias Claudius to sing, including the fourth line "The forest is dark and silent."

Kopper and his team start the chase in the radio cell where Watzlawick's cell phone was last located. A policeman with a mantrailer dog also joins the team . A unit of the riot police is also supposed to join the team, but Kopper doesn't want to wait for them despite a colleague's advice. You can follow the trail to the Neuscharfeneck castle ruins and find Watzlawick's burned cell phone there. When they look around, they hear gunshots in the forest. The helicopter support arrives and Kopper sends them in the direction from which the shot came. You get closer and closer to the group.

The escape ends somewhat amateurishly with the attempted crossing of a lake in a leaky rowing boat, which goes down halfway. After the commissioner is freed, the boys are taken away. Lena and Kopper talk to them again, but the group does not reveal the perpetrator according to the motto “All together or none (AZOK)”. At home, Kopper and Lena talk about the events over dinner and about the fact that one of the boys will talk at some point, if only to save his own skin.

The TV movie ends at this point and continues in an online game.

You are in the Ludwigshafen district, you can examine the evidence gathered so far and interrogate all five boys. Furthermore, you can look around the Rauhberghof, ask the educator Weber and other employees again. Further clues and evidence can also be gathered there. Murat is incriminated by the evidence and confesses to the crime during a final interrogation.

background

Filming location, Neuscharfeneck Castle

Most of the film takes place in the Palatinate Forest Nature Park . The main filming locations included the Neuscharfeneck castle ruins , the Landauer Hütte and the Hochstein rock group . The sequence of actions in the film does not necessarily match the geographical conditions. The crime scene in the film is a fictional devil's head rock . The nearby inn serving as the starting point for the investigation is called the Devil's Kitchen . In reality, the distance between the Hochstein near Dahn and the Landauer Hütte is over 20 km. The Neuscharfeneck castle ruins, which were reached in the film on the escape of the group of perpetrators after a day's march and used as an overnight option, can in reality be hiked within 15 minutes from the Landauer Hütte. In addition, a real “escape” in the direction of France would not have to cross any larger body of water, as shown in the final scene.

The online game for The Forest is Black and Silent, which was available for a week after it was broadcast, was used by 110,000 users; 20,000 played to the end and identified the perpetrator.

The title The forest stands black and is silent quotes the fourth line of the first stanza of Matthias Claudius ' poem Abendlied (c. 1778).

reception

Audience ratings

The first broadcast of The Forest stands black and silent was seen in Germany by 8.37 million viewers and achieved a market share of 24.6% for Das Erste ; In the group of 14- to 49-year-old viewers , 2.72 million viewers and a market share of 19.3% were achieved. On May 13, 2012, the episode was the most watched program on German television.

criticism

“With 'The forest is black and silent', the 'crime scene' returns to its classic, but much more sparingly used topic of social criticism in recent years. No abstruse thriller aesthetics like the last one with Mehmet Kurtuluş , no psychopathic serial killer in the manner of Henning Mankell. The tension arises mainly from the group dynamics: between the kidnappers and their hostage, but also between the five young men who play excellent and are cast according to their type. They play the mixture of violence, harshness, despair and vulnerability so insistently that the social kitsch stays under the cover. You carry the film safely over all lurking clichés. "

"The meta-topic is trust and betrayal, so the idea behind the case is pretty big, but in the reality typical of the crime scene, the wildness of the five human mutts has evaporated to a very consumable format."

"With the 'The forest is black and silent' there is finally another good 'crime scene' from Ludwigshafen."

“A special 'crime scene' that has absolutely nothing to do with the common scheme of corpse, second corpse, investigation, wrong track and investigation. Just the fact that he plays completely in the forest and is very physical due to the escape situation sets him apart from everything that has been seen so far. A 'crime scene' that supports what Joachim Król recently said in an interview with FOCUS Online: The 'crime scene' is 'the premium segment on German television'. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Contents Tatort +: The online investigation into the SWR crime scene “The forest is black and silent”. The first, accessed on May 13, 2012 : "At this point the viewers become investigators - in the first online game, the crime scene."
  2. SWR: Who was the culprit? The confession | Tatort + , May 20, 2012
  3. DWDL.de : "Tatort": Online game reached 110,000 users , accessed on May 28, 2012.
  4. Sidney Schering: Primetime-Check: Sunday, March 13, 2012.quotemeter.de , accessed on May 15, 2012 .
  5. Hubert Spiegel : Alone among offenders. In: Feuilleton. Frankfurter Allgemeine, May 11, 2012, accessed on May 14, 2012 .
  6. Holger Gertz : Five human mutt. In: Tatort column. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 13, 2012, accessed on May 13, 2012 .
  7. Martin Geiger: Odenthal and Kopper beat Klopp. In: Ludwigshafen. Mannheimer Morgen, May 14, 2012, accessed on May 14, 2012 .
  8. ^ Sandra Zistl: Ulrike Folkerts and the hostage drama of Ludwigshafen. In: crime scene criticism. FOCUS, May 13, 2012, accessed May 14, 2012 .