Crime scene: war in the head
| Episode of the series Tatort | |
|---|---|
| Original title | War in the head |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| length | 89 minutes |
| classification | Episode 1126 ( List ) |
| First broadcast | March 29, 2020 on Das Erste |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jobs Christian Oetzmann |
| script | Christian Jeltsch |
| production | Iris pine |
| music | Sebastian Fillenberg |
| camera | Volker Tittel |
| cut | Anke Berthold |
| occupation | |
| |
War in the head is a television film from the crime series Tatort . The contribution produced by Norddeutscher Rundfunk is the 1126th Tatort episode and was broadcast for the first time on March 29, 2020 in the program Das Erste and SRF 1 . Chief Detective Charlotte Lindholm is investigating her 27th case.
action
Benno Vegener appears at the police station and talks confused about "voices in his head" and that someone is chasing him. When he is not taken that seriously, he overpowers Charlotte Lindholm, who happens to be in the area of the district. He threatens her with a knife and her colleague Anaïs Schmitz has to make a decision in a split second - she shoots the man.
Lindholm's superior, Gerd Liebig, forbids Lindholm to investigate her own case, but the commissioner takes no further notice of this instruction. She wants to look around Vegener's apartment and finds his wife strangled in the bathtub. The six-year-old son is also in the apartment, but he is unharmed.
According to initial research, the assassin was a professional soldier and only returned from a mission in Mali with a mental disorder six months ago . Another five soldiers returned with him, two of whom recently killed themselves and one female soldier has been in a wheelchair since attempting suicide. The widow of one of the men also speaks of voices that her husband claims to have heard. Lindholm and her colleague Schmitz initially assume that the men had not gotten to grips with the events of their last deployment in Mali, but there are increasing indications that the soldiers were actually manipulated. Vegener's little son reports that he saw a man and a woman in his parents' apartment. During the autopsy of Vegener's wife, traces of powder were found at the strangulation point, which indicate latex gloves and thus external influence.
Meanwhile Anaïs Schmitz also has psychological problems, which she classifies as after-effects of her fatal shot. In a vision she keeps seeing Benno Vegener with his gunshot wound, as he looks at her plaintively. She also receives photos of war victims in Mali sent to his cell phone, which disappeared shortly afterwards and unbearable voices in her head blame her for Vegener's death. And Lindholm too begins to hear an artificial-sounding babble of voices when she discovers a secret room in the basement of Vegener's house. Through the cellar window she sees a black van driving away and the noises in her head stop. She requests forensic technology and has the room searched. Vegener apparently gathered material on secret brain research here. Among them are many indications that the CIA attempted to manipulate people into functioning like robots. Such experiments allegedly also took place in Germany. The inexplicable suicides of Vegener's comrades seems to Lindholm to be proof that there is something to these claims. She researched and found out that there is actually the possibility of using hyper-sonic sound to send a directed sound to a specific person and, using other high-tech methods, to get people to do things that they would otherwise never do would.
When Lindholm found out that a German armaments company had developed special combat helmets that were used for the first time in Mali, she had this helmet demonstrated to her. So she can feel firsthand how she can become calmer, more attentive, painless or aggressive through the helmet, depending on what the control center specifies. The commissioners then want to meet with the brain specialist who was involved in the development of this helmet. But strangely enough, he has just suffered a fatal heart attack.
Forensics can find videos of Vegener intending to make the "war in his head" public. His visit to the police station should be the first step. Since his wife had also seen her husband's problems and knew too much, she too had to die. After analyzing the surveillance recordings, the day Vegener took Lindholm hostage, his activity was triggered by an external impulse, because at the same time the coffee machine started, the wall clock went off and the printer began to print blank sheets.
In the end, Lindholm succeeds in proving that the new helmets had failed in the practical test and that a serious breakdown occurred in Mali, because a female soldier shot her own comrades under the influence of the brain stimulation. The MAD wanted to cover this up and propagated an alleged ambush. For this he ruthlessly sacrificed his own soldiers and persecuted the surviving witnesses until they killed themselves. But he did not shrink from direct murder of Vegener's wife either. Alfred Neumann from MAD makes it clear to Lindholm, however, that politicians will ensure that none of their military actions are made public and that the police are actually only responsible for investigating Lisa Vegener's death. But he writes the name of a woman on a piece of paper for Lindholm who is found dead in her car shortly afterwards and who was responsible for the murder of Lisa Vegener.
The investigation documents are confiscated as classified information by the military. But both Lindholm and Scmitz have secured a "back up" on a USB stick . They pass this on to a radio station, which is now publicly denouncing the machinations of the MAD.
background
The film was shot from August 13, 2019 to September 12, 2019 in Göttingen and Hamburg .
The practices discussed in the film, such as mind control , transcranial magnetic stimulation or microwaves, are "at least partially possible" in reality, according to Christopher Coenen from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He calls the neuro-research in this regard a "dramatic development". Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are said to have succeeded in sending audio messages into a person's ear using a laser beam. There is also a chip that acts as a brain-computer interface and enables communication between the brain and a computer. The transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is actually intended for the treatment of patients with stroke, depression, Alzheimer's or schizophrenia, can also help healthy people to become more alert, more alert and less sensitive to pain.
The terms “ MK Ultra ” and “ Operation Artichoke ” used in the film are also based on real facts. The CIA set from 1953 to the 1970s, subjects under hallucinogenic drugs to such a mind control he reached. In the case of "Operation Artichoke", this was even done in the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan.
reception
Audience ratings
The first broadcast of Krieg im Kopf on March 29, 2020 was seen by 9.51 million viewers in Germany and achieved a market share of 25.2% for Das Erste .
Reviews
Tittelbach.tv said: “War in the head” “tells of the desires that science has always aroused in arms companies and the military - and it shows how findings from brain research are used today for military purposes. What sounds like a 'terminator', the construction of interfaces between man and machine, is now a reality. So the film is not a speculative robber gun and also much less science fiction in the 'crime scene' format than, for example, the episodes “ HAL ” or “ Echolot ”. The greatest plus of this thematically, dramatically and cinematically exciting 'crime scene' is the great clarity, immediacy and sensuality of the threat scenarios and the mind control techniques used. The very close concern of the commissioners does the rest. "
At the FAZ , Ursula Scheer judged: “Man and machine, the military and the power over thoughts, cyborg warriors and technically absolutized orders - this 'crime scene' takes on big topics occupied by conspiracy theorists, dramaturgically sovereign, statuary in the embodiment of Protagonists. [...] A large part of its tension is created by the film directed by Jobst Christian Oetzmann with psychological terror sequences in which we see what cannot be from the perspective of the characters, or look at them as they wriggle and torture inside scream."
Christian Buß from Der Spiegel judged cautiously: “Scriptwriter Christian Jeltsch wrote some extremely forward-looking episodes for the Bremen 'Tatort', while director Jobst Christian Oetzmann is responsible for the daring Munich episodes of the series. […] With their current 'crime scene', however, the narrative strategy remains nebulous. For a themed thriller about the latest techniques of warfare, the two of them are too speculative about their subject, for an unleashed paranoia B-movie they step too often on the brakes. "
Claudia Tieschky from Süddeutsche Zeitung felt the same way . She wrote: “In general, one often has the reflex to take cover, so fundamentally aggressive is the mood of the two commissioners. Script (Christian Jeltsch) and direction (Jobst Christian Oetzmann) make them ice cold, but quite uninteresting rivals. […] Certainly there will be viewers who stay with us anyway because they are fans of Maria Furtwängler and Florence Kasumba. Nevertheless, the hour and a half could be better spent looking lovingly at your autograph cards. "
Bettina Hartmann from the Stuttgarter Zeitung also found the crime scene “very overloaded” and said: “The crime thriller starts out brilliantly, but gets lost more and more in a wide variety of topics, gets entangled in conspiracy theories - and is ultimately not the big political crime thriller he likes would. 'It's good to stay. Sometimes staying is better, 'says Charlotte Lindholm at the end. 'Less is good. Sometimes switching off is better, 'you think as a viewer at home. "
“It's about voice-to-skull experiments, torture ultrasound weapons including mind control techniques and the Exo Scull 23, a new kind of AI combat helmet made in Hanover, which was secretly tested in Mali and looks like it was from Playmobil. Unfortunately, this 'crime scene' does not succeed in telling at least one of the three narrative threads that have been touched on in a really believable and deeper way. After all: The final scene with the soldier (Katharina Schlothauer), who was the last of the Mali troops to remain alive and who ensures the dissolution, remains the most impressive in the head, ”wrote the Münchner Abendzeitung
Web links
- Crime scene: War in the head in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Crime scene: war in the head press book of the NDR
- Summary of the plot of war in the head on the ARD website
- War in the head at Tatort-Fans.de
- Crime scene: war in the head at crew-united.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Tatort: War in the head at crew united
- ↑ Tatort: War in the head at ndr.de retrieved
- ↑ Julia Bernewasser: How relistic was the Göttingen crime scene? Retrieved from the Berliner Morgenpost .
- ↑ Fabian Riedner: Prime Time check: Sunday, 29 March 2020. Quotenmeter.de , March 30, 2020 accessed on 30 March 2020 .
- ^ Rainer Tittelbach: Furtwängler, Kasumba, Jeltsch, Oetzmann. The voices in the head of the commissioner at Tittelbach.tv
- ↑ Ursula Scheer: The voices in the head are the beginning of all evils. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 27, 2020, accessed on March 27, 2020 .
- ↑ Christian Buß: "Tatort" on armament experiments. The enemy in my head Der Spiegel , March 27, 2020, accessed on March 27, 2020 : "Rating: 4 out of 10 points"
- ↑ Claudia Tieschky: A question of bell-bottoms. Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 27, 2020, accessed on March 28, 2020 .
- ↑ Bettina Hartmann: Very overloaded at stuttgarter-zeitung.de
- ↑ Incredible brain experiments in the Lindholm crime scene at abendzeitung-muenchen.de
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