«Totenfrau», a mountain thriller that can be watched in one breath (score 7 and 1/2) – time.news

by time news
Of Maurice Porro

The miniseries on Netflix has some surprises on the ending that make you think, but the second season is awaited

«Totenfrau» The lady of the dead: you have to go and find this thriller that you follow in one breath, often holding it back, because it doesn’t have much marketing. It is an Austrian high-mountain thriller that takes place in Annenhof, in the Tyrolean mountains still covered in snow, and contains atrocities and intrigues and hidden truths typical of American-style metropolitan realities for which the second season is obviously awaited, therefore watch out for Netflix hosting it.

But when you think of Austria, you think of Viennaand when one thinks of Vienna one immediately goes to the Crypt of the Capuchins, to Freud, to Klimt, to the waltzes of Strauss and at most to Schnitzler’s Double Dream, certainly not to a small village hidden in the snow where an accident leaves a good policeman and it will be his wife Blum who will gradually shed light on the non-accidental death of her husband and on the requiem that a crazy old man shouts at the funeral in church.

He discovers that he had gotten his hands on a traffic of very young girls raped, raped, hidden and then killed. But one, the young illegal immigrant Dunja, manages to escape and the good widow takes care of her, in the linda mountain house but not Tyrolean, without cuckoo clocks, where she lives with her two young children and her alarmed father-in-law. She runs a funeral home, so not a cheerful job, which we learned to know in that masterpiece series that was «Six feet under»: she will be able to put six feet under the ground some men entangled in horrendous crimes, even if the best it comes at the end.

And if the fact that the lady of the place, the snow queen (Michjou Friesz, the physicist of the role) mean and with bleary eyes like only Barbara Stanwyck in certain films of dirty souls from the 50s, manages human sins also for economic purposes, because tourism gives a lot of added value, two final surprises of the 6 episodes of the miniseries give us food for thought. Very well told, “Totenfrau” requires that we leave all our disbelief on the sofa, we must embrace the cause and appreciate the unusual tension of a mystery of dirty sexual affairs that the pure, blue air and snow of the Austrian Alps do not cleanse.

Anna Maria Muhe is Blum, invincible, stubborn protagonist, suffering but… and has a body that is injured but does not bend, and heals quickly. Among the protagonists of the infamous affair there is also the art of photography, because it is grafted into investigations, as in the original novel by Bernhard Aichner, a 2014 best seller set in Innsbruck, which plays with horror, gothic fear and the familiar one, a vitaminic mixture to which four screenwriters have looked after in addition to Nicolai Ruhde who is also the director who among the main actors includes mobile phones which, as happens more and more often, are the driving force of the subject the whodunit, as Hitchcock would have said.

Good and evil, in the shady fog of a place mountain where one thinks of Alpine choirs, while young ladies are tortured here, but a last past and a last remorse are cleverly revealed at the end of the sixth episode, after many have paid for their sins, even the parish priest of the town engulfed in flames like Joan of Arc. And black humor is not missing either because our heroine, right from the start, converses with the dead while she gives them the last look.

March 29, 2023 (change March 29, 2023 | 07:34)

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