A look at Maurice Querner’s “crime scene”.
There is something very special about these Felix Murot crime scenes. The thrillers are always a bit weirder than the usual crime scene fare. Ratings are never particularly high, and critical acclaim is often muted.
Nevertheless, a surprising number of Murot crime novels are remembered. In the first films, a tumor spoke to the investigator. In the gangster thriller “Born in Pain” there were a whopping 150 dead. Sometimes a remote police station had to be defended in the style of a Western, there was also a doppelganger and other times Murot experienced a situation à la “Marmot Day” over and over again. Not every crime scene can show such sustainability. And Ulrich Tukur’s joy in playing, who gives Murot a balance between cynical and arrogant, seems unbroken.
This is the case again in “Murot and the Law of Karma”. And the story conceived by Lars Hubrich and Matthias X Oberg is also composed quite cleverly. Murot is badly played with, he becomes the victim of a young con artist (Anna Unterberger) in a hotel and is also confronted with shadows of his past. Something is going wrong for him. Just bad karma, as a doctor tries to explain to him. Our actions have effects and consequences on other people, but sooner or later (perhaps even in the next life) also for ourselves. And it seems at first that Murot could have been guilty earlier. This past is interwoven with the present, in which entrepreneur Schöller (great Philipp Hochmair) and his lackey Xavier (Thomas Schmauser also very good) concoct all kinds of misdeeds in order to get hold of a laptop with explosive data.
The story is told believably, the interaction between Tukur and Barbara Philipp as co-inspector Magda Wächter is spot on and cameraman Max Preiss delivers beautiful images in a gloomy light. But the film lacks what should be part of the DNA of every crime film: suspense. Matthias X Oberg staged the thriller far too cautiously in everything, and he also left far too little room for the existing grotesque moment. This resulted in tiring lengths, so there was always the danger of dozing off. Apparently, the thriller should live more on mood than action. But this concept only worked to a very limited extent in the eleventh Murot thriller. So let’s look forward to the twelfth edition, and it’s sure to come. There will be no resolution as to whether Murot is the father of the con artist. The inspector’s smile in the final image can be interpreted by any spectator as he or she wishes.