Da Two people are sitting opposite each other in a blue-tinged room. The door is open. The woman, she’s a commissioner, wouldn’t be able to stand being in this room otherwise. They are both disabled. Desperate too.
She, Brasch is her name, is constantly haunted in the new Magdeburg “Polizeiruf” red-tinged, grainy filmed scenes, by memories of how she was locked in a couple from hell, humiliated, tormented until she stabbed.
Him, Adam his name is, a pale young man with hair that can hardly be tamed, blood spattered all over his shirt and face, and his memory lets him down. He killed a man on the train. And he doesn’t know why.
They had been so happy, he and his friend, on the way to his parents. Then the man came, shouted into his cell phone. And then the boy got up and grabbed the emergency hammer from the compartment wall. And struck, again and again, like mad. Until the blood spurted, until he’d overkill the man.
There is a lot that runs like a red narrative thread through this Sunday evening crime season, which is now coming to an end with the new Magdeburg “Polizeiruf 110”. Pretty much all of it can be found in the “Black Box” by Zora Holtfreter (script) and Ute Wieland (director).
The female investigators in “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf” have not only caught up with their male colleagues in terms of number (which is high time), they have also reached a level of complexity in psychological conditioning and disruption that is comparable to the twelve-level commissioner Faber-in-Dortmund scale quite often gets stuck at a whopping ten. Their biographies and their traumas rampage around in them. They are haunted by very old or barely outdated ghosts, stories.
The memory does what it wants
For this reason, among other things, and because the present as a whole can no longer be trusted, memory has actually replaced all somehow socially relevant topics that were otherwise – laboriously and variously at least three times in a row – told ad nauseam. The “Theme Night” Sunday night crime thriller is history. It rarely gets political. Refugees, Nazis – all over. The memory speaks. Or not. And when she speaks, she does it as she likes to do in real life. Anarchic. Artfully messy.
Which in turn has consequences for the storytelling. The classic no-nonsense investigative thriller – Murder, Interrogation, Where Were You Sunday, Dead? My man? Shot? My husband”, chase, lead away, sausage stand, everything is in balance in the German justice system – no longer works if you can no longer rely on memories. The time continuum is suspended, the chronology.
Fragile luck: Adam (Eloi Christ) and his friend Tomi (Kai Müller)
Which: MDR/filmpool fiction/Conny Klein
There is such a jump between the time levels that sometimes you don’t know exactly where you stand and what – the hell – the actual story is. The new retrospective games are so complex that you become the real enlightener of the evening more than you used to. If you watch the Sunday evening thriller on linear television, which only very few do, you are not allowed to leave the living room for an hour and a half. Missed a flashback and you’re lost.
In the “black box”, which in aviation is a kind of tachograph that records everything that may have led to a catastrophe in the end, the second leg labyrinth leads Brasch into which she uses her oversized intuition and her even greater spirit of resistance to everyone Bans on thinking and investigating issued by the authorities, gradually all the way back to Adam’s beginning.
The two disabled people from the bluish beginning of this story recognize each other. And Brasch won’t let go. Can’t be distracted, can’t be left cold. Not from the caring, obsequious boss who wants to send her back to the police psychologist as long as she can’t stand closed-door rooms. It’s called brownish. Brasch: “I don’t go to anyone whose name is Bräunlich.”
Not from Adam’s parents – he, the former head of the LKA, who still knows exactly where the buttons are to put subaltern inspectors under the greatest possible pressure, she used to be the giant of memory research, who knows exactly how to manipulate brains and memories. Everywhere along the way, Holtfreter and Wieland set up changing flashback screens. You can’t miss anything that’s on it.
The color dramaturgy of the individual layers of history is extremely finely tuned. Everything is played with a frightening intensity. What you are used to from Claudia Michelsen, the extreme athlete of minimalism, as Brasch. Eloi Christs Adam is not much behind her. Sven-Eric Bechtolf and Corinna Kirchhoff are the perfect loving parents from hell in the freezing cold they are capable of.
Black Box is a worthy season finale to the very end. And then there’s the last ten seconds. Where something like liberation takes place in rooms that don’t have to remain open from then on. And where Claudia Michelsen as Brasch, this always a bit stubborn empathy monstrosity, does something that you would no longer have thought possible in this labyrinthine cold chamber. You have to persevere for that long. Absolutely. And then it’s summer break. Uff.