Who really is the person with whom I share my life and whom I actually think I know well? The young gallery owner Anara van Veeren (Marlene Tanczik) and her smart husband, the IT entrepreneur Max (Klaus Steinbacher), seem to be a dream couple. Light-flooded high-rise loft high above Frankfurt am Main, pure luxury.
But the first images scratch the perfect facade: a gloomy residential area, a lonely parking deck, Anara seems to be fleeing from someone in fear of her life. She gets into her car, and then the crack occurs: the car has been sabotaged, Anara speeds into a construction site without braking and ends up in the intensive care unit in a coma. Game over.
With just a few shots, the gripping, well-cast psychological thriller “Blindspot,” which airs on Monday at 8:15 p.m. on ZDF, lets us look into the depths of a relationship. Director Hannu Salonen (“Oktoberfest 1900”) tells us about the pitfalls of perception from the perspective of the supposedly self-confident alpha male Max.
Trapped in a hall of mirrors
The successful man discovers that his wife has been leading a double life – with lots of drugs and a lover who is pretty much the opposite of himself. The traces of Anara’s hidden existence lead to a mysterious nightclub, which for the narcissistically inclined Max becomes a hall of mirrors from which there is ultimately no escape.
“Paranoia plays a big role in the film overall,” says the director and self-confessed Hitchcock admirer Salonen, according to the ZDF press release, about this thriller, which also has nasty swipes at the modern working world. Max soon suspects his colleague Patrick (Marcus Mittermeier) of having had an affair with Anara. His colleague Saskia (Felicitas Woll), who is actually on Max’s side, is also increasingly proving to be a rather unscrupulous careerist.
Cleverly constructed script
As a team, the three of them are supposed to conclude a multi-million dollar deal with a sheikh – it involves spy software that can also be used against one’s own population. But Max loses more and more control – and is dismissed with a cold smile.
The script by Marc O. Seng, co-author of the Netflix mystery series “Dark,” cleverly constructed with flashbacks and dream sequences, has a few political tips in its bag. When asked whether one could simply make deals with autocrats, mother-of-two Saskia replied coldly: “We want to become world export champions again.” Then the drama about the high-flyer Max, who falls from his pedestal, begins, and this unusual thriller actually manages to keep us viewers guessing until the last sequence. Was this breathless journey through hell just a bad dream in the end?