A horror-movie gimmick of a plot—nearly identical crimes separated by 23 years—instead makes for a fine German mystery. We know what happened in 1986 — two friends, out for a drive, follow an eleven-year-old girl. One rapes her. The other, though shaken, says nothing. Now a small police force is looking for another girl whose bike was found in the same field as the other girl’s. Despite the premise, there is virtually no violence after the opening sequence, and only a couple of scenes are suspenseful in the manner of a straight thriller. Instead, director Baran bo Odar (adapting a novel by Jan Costin Wagner) holds your attention (and builds a lingering suspense) by following the eclectic troop of officers trying to solve this unusual crime as well as the parents of the missing girl, and the mother of the 1986 victim.
There are too many characters to truly flesh out all of them, but Sebastian Blomberg and Wotan Wilke Möhring stand out as two haunted men. One is a cop who, grieving for his wife, seems barely able to function; the other is haunted by guilt and disgusted by his own desires. The film is as much about grief and loss as about what happened. A miniseries might better have developed the many briefly explored characters and subplots — like exactly what happened to the cop’s wife, the animosity between the retiring police chief (who still wants to investigate the new crime) and the incoming one, the way the marriage of the girl’s parents strains after she disappears, etc. But Möhring brings an eerieness to the storytelling that makes it mostly riveting.
IMDb link
viewed 4/3/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/3/13
POOP!
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