The black sun over a German family
Commissioner Paul Brix (Wolfram Koch, left) interviews Ulrich Gombrecht (Uwe Preuss)
Source: HR/Degeto/Bettina Mueller
The new Frankfurt “Tatort” is a horror film. It begins with screams in the woods, but mostly takes place on a family battlefield. Everything fits together in the highest toxicity. But one stands out above all.
Dhe “Tatort” has tried horror several times. There were bloodsuckers in Bremen, for example. And then there was Lars Eidinger three times. The beginning of all horrors in the case of “Darkness”, the latest Frankfurt “Tatort”, is German. Very German.
It’s in the woods, it’s dark, and everything in this horror film begins at a goddamn gas station, which, at least cinematically, has become a kind of central point of outbreak of social malaise in Germany in recent years. In “darkness” a couple is cycling through night and forest. You hear something. a scream see what. A car.
And because they’ve probably seen too few films from the “Blair Witch” department in their lives, they’re getting closer. Until everything escalates, we startle and they run and rush. Back to the gas station. What they don’t know and what they no longer have anything to do with: The real horror only begins when the sun hangs high over a tranquil bourgeois idyll in front of Frankfurt and the story creeps dangerously. The real horror dwells in the thicket of the family. And that’s deadlier than any dark romance night story.
That could be very German again. But it is not. “Darkness”, written and directed by Petra Lüschow, is a universal tragedy. One could easily quote “Anna Karenina” again (don’t shout “just don’t”, I won’t).
How should a dead fast hike?
The bourgeois tragedy of a group of people who are socially and genetically closely connected, in which a poison has accumulated over the decades that they have been living together (or doing what they think is living together), which at some point almost inevitably had to lead to where the commissars Janneke and Brix are now standing.
The case is as follows: The car in the forest, the traces of blood in the forest belong to Maria Gombrecht. She should actually, says her husband, say her daughters Kristina and Judith, be on a fasting hike in France. She had just inherited quite a bit of money. She wanted to study literature and start all over again. With her husband, of course, says Ulrich, her husband.
A terribly poisoned family: Kristina (Odine Johne, l.), Judith (Julia Riedler) and Ulrich Gombrecht (Uwe Preuss)
Source: HR/Degeto/Bettina Mueller
Ulrich is terminally ill. Kristina is heavily pregnant, patent, and has dedicated her life to the care and observation of her parents in the house across the street. And Judith, the sister, plays theater in Berlin, which is why she is constantly dependent on family subsidies. The sisters are fond of one another with heartfelt dislike.
The spectacular thing about “Darkness” is the unspectacular. Petra Lüschow lets us dig deeper and deeper into the everyday, archetypal abysses of the Gombrechts at a ridiculously slow pace alongside Brix and Janneke, the two downright spooky, down to the bone sober people understanders.
Into a toxic madhouse, in which everyone has contributed their dose to the general poisoning of the environment over the years. In which, invisible to others, such deadly violence reigned subliminally that at some point in the forest, at night, it had to end in horror.
Now we could sing various songs of praise. On the elegant, almost pointy-fingered restraint with which Lüschow acted in her commissariat, which Gombrechts more or less allows himself to be exposed. On the sober pictures. To the interplay of the hostile sisters Odine Johne and Julia Riedler. To the living hereafter of Victoria Trauttmannsdorff’s Maria.
However, what Uwe Preuss is doing there must not remain unsung. Uwe Preuss – in the Rostock “Polizeiruf” the honest skin at the head of the police department there, who repeatedly had to save Charly Hübner’s Sascha Bukow from the consequences of his self-imposed irresponsibility – is Ulrich Gombrecht. The black sun over this family’s universe.
One that everyone knows. A master of the snide remark, the double looks, the double game. An inconspicuous monster. A shapeshifter. Preuss makes him shimmer every second. The physical states of this manipulative character run like shivers down his face. One marvels. And don’t be surprised what has become of the Gombrechts next door.