The “lateral thinker” that we loved – he lives
Schnabel and the suspects: Martin Brambach (center) with the Teichmanns (Kristin Suckow and (Nico Rogner)
Quelle: MDR/MadeFor/Hardy Spitz
We would have missed him a lot, the Dresden “Tatort” department head Peter Michael Schnabel. At last he lay dead in his blood. Now he’s back. And must clarify the question of whether the gardener is actually always the murderer.
DThe good news of the new “Tatort” year right away. No, not that there are fewer commissariats and that ARD provides each of them with the same budget per episode as, say, one episode, “Babylon Berlin” costs. We’re not utopians. no
In the “crime scene” good news is of course always smaller. The good news comes from Dresden: Peter Michael Schnabel is not dead at all. Schnabel is the head of the Dresden office.
And actually we could only stand it to a limited extent from the start. Martin Brambach, who is Schnabel and whom we like very much, did a great job. A conservative bone, as in the “Tatort” cliché book for overwhelmed, backward-looking department heads.
A bit angry citizens, a bit lateral thinkers. But actually a good one. It takes Martin Brambach to turn someone like that into an indispensable semi-sympathetic.
In any case, we had already said goodbye to him in the last case. There he lay in his blood. Someone even more conspiracy maniacs than Schnabel had kidnapped him. And we wouldn’t have been surprised if Schnabel had never got up again.
ARD/MDR TATORT: TOTES HERZ, on Sunday (January 08, 2023) at 8:15 p.m. on ERSTE. Karin Gorniak (Karin Hanczewski) and Leonie Winkler (Cornelia Gröschel) find a suspect’s cell phone…n. © MDR/MadeFor/Hardy Spitz, free of charge – use according to the terms and conditions in close editorial context with the mentioned MDR program when mentioning “Image: MDR/MadeFor/Hardy Spitz” (S2+). MDR/HA Communication, 04360 Leipzig, Tel: (0341) 300 6477 or – 6463
Quelle: MDR/MadeFor/Hardy Spitz
After all, 2022 was an ill-fated year for great Sunday night crime investigators. Charly Hübner’s Sascha Bukow left the Rostock “Polizeiruf” office (to Russia!) still alive. After Nina Rubin (Meret Becker) in Berlin and Martina Bönisch (Anna Schudt) in Dortmund, Schnabel would have been the third, actually irreplaceable, large corpse.
Now, in addition to his usual weirdness, which makes him utter terribly inappropriate sentences at crime scenes and which he’s – well – deadly serious about, he’s also slightly traumatized. Which makes him even more unbearable for his colleagues Gorniak (Karin Hanczewski) and Winkler (Cornelia Gröscher), whose virtuosity in ignoring the beak is being put to increasingly severe tests.
In any case, he is very much alive. He almost sprints into Dead Heart. That’s the name of the new case. He also needs the sprinting thing. It starts out like your average nightly crime novel.
A gardener lies dead on a bed of pansies, which in itself is quite symbolic. Schnabel, who first thinks of “a bed of roses means sleeping on thorns”, stirs up everything that an average early-evening thriller offers in terms of plot monotony.
The marriage of the bereaved was of course in crisis. Of course, the son-in-law is cheating on Swetlana, his gardening assistant. Juri, her brother with cognitive disabilities, flees with the Tat-Hammer and is of course very suspicious. For half an hour, the story bobs along as flatly as the Elbe in midsummer.
The game is different than it seems
If you don’t look closely. And listen. The soundtrack knows more than anyone else in this game right from the start. Chris Bremus has put a post “joker” score over, behind everything that seems way too hard and way too dark, but it isn’t because the game is very different than what it initially seems.
And Andreas Herzog, who staged Kristin Derfler’s first “Tatort” book, is irritated by what is being played out in “Tote Herz”, from the beginning with strange angles, changes of perspective, cuts. Something is wrong beyond what is usually wrong in the usual bourgeois tragedies of the average German crime film. And which are then reliably cleared up by Soko Leipzig, Hamburg or Stuttgart within three quarters of an hour.
“Totes Herz” you have to give exactly this three quarters of an hour. Then the investigation gradually turns more and more into the characters and their (GDR) past. It’s about missing children and criminal doctors and a case of murderous confusion.
In the end, everyone goes crazy. And then you need something calculable, not surprising. Karl Lauterbach with Anne Will, for example. Or Marie Agnes Strack Zimmermann. But there isn’t. There is Brokenwood. Since investigating the New Zealand colleagues of Peter Michael Schnabel. The case is called “Scared to Death”. Well then.