Dhe beginning of this SWR “crime scene” is deceptive. Streaks of fog hang over the valley, forests rise at its edges. It begins with nocturnal images that seem like premonitions charged with natural magic (camera Andreas Schäfauer).
An idyll, this Black Forest village. A wolf roams in it at night. Many bloody carcasses lie on the meadow. It looks murderous, but that would be a moral view. In the village, morals and manners are kept high, there is an anti-wolf initiative that makes representations to the forester (Cornelius Obonya). The church is well attended, the confirmation of Antonia (Carlotta Bähre), known as Toni, is celebrated as a community-building event.
Appropriately, her confirmation verse comes from the first letter of John, it deals with the love of God for people and the obligations of neighborly love derived from it. He is quietly important to this thoughtfully told case. For a cold-case investigation in which Franziska Tobler (Eva Löbau) and Friedemann Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner) have to ask themselves what they overlooked about Toni’s mother’s missing persons fifteen years ago. The case remained unsolved, the secret preserved, Toni’s underage mother Rosa missing – until now, when her skeletonized body is dug up at the edge of the lake. It’s just almost an idyll, this Black Forest village.
The beast human
In the forest, the wolf of this “crime scene” moves as part of nature, not as an emanation of evil. The staging by Julia Langhof based on the quiet-soled screenplay by Nicole Armbruster (“To hell with the others”, “Freistatt” with Marc Brummund) does not anthropomorphize this predator, which distinguishes this crime thriller from many others in which wolf symbols, wolf metaphors and Wolf emblems are currently popular or even play a leading role, as in Christian Petzold’s Munich classic “Polizeiruf 110: Wölfe” with Matthias Brandt and Barbara Auer.
Trailer
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“Crime Scene: Down in the Valley”
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Video: ARD, Image: SWR/Benoît Linder
Here the beast is and remains the human being. “Down in the valley” is a classic black village story, as in Gottfried Keller. This time Juliet and Romeo were Toni’s young mother and the youthful innkeeper’s son Axel Leibing (Tonio Schneider) in the village. The child was given away as an infant by the grandparents Josef Winterfeld (Obonya) and Meike (Inka Friedrich), brought back by them after Rosa’s disappearance and raised as if they were their own. The witnesses from that time are still silent now. Rosa’s best friend Elif (Canan Samadi) is reluctant to be questioned. In the morning she lies dead in the middle of the village. She entrusted a fateful letter to the post office. The suspect is the alcoholic Werner Trödle (Aurel Manthei), a notorious violent criminal, who has just been released from prison. In the village they build a wolf safety fence, in the inn they try junk with the temptation to drink schnapps.
Armbruster wrote a basically old-fashioned moral history, or rather a timeless case of Tobler and Berg, in the investigative archive. In “Down in the Valley” the inspectors are pleasantly reticent about their own troubles, the flashbacks are only told in multiple perspectives as the memories pass through, because there is one terrible truth behind them. Last but not least, this “crime scene” is an actor’s film in which the grieving grandparents, played by Cornelius Obonya and Inka Friedrich, present brilliantly acted scenes in their apparently cozy paneled Black Forest room.
The Crime scene: Down in the valley runs this Sunday at 8.15 p.m. in the first.