In this crime scene with Ulrich Tukur as investigator Murot, it’s about the hunt for explosive data from an IT company – and it’s a pretty good sign of the film’s persuasiveness that the question only dawns on you after a long time, why someone still supports such a transfer today should hand over a whole laptop. In a leather case. Maybe for style reasons.
Large parts of the Wiesbaden episode “Murot and the Law of Karma” play in a luxury hotel and in Murot’s state of mind, both have about the same carpet-dampened surreality half beyond reality – in music one would perhaps speak of the Murot chord. But the greatest music lover here is the evil henchman of the company boss; the concert broadcast on the hotel television causes him to have great feelings in the middle of his work (“That’s great music!”), and at the same time he suffocates someone.
And borrowed directly from German Romanticism is the rural nest in which two young women hoard the spoils of robberies in the hotel and live in otherwise thieving freedom. Men at the hotel bar quickly become victims of knockout drops, shamed, Murot too. At some point, the thieves’ loot includes the laptop and Murot’s driver’s license with his photo as a young man. This old picture then sets the actual story in motion. The story is quickly interesting, it has pace and sometimes comedy, and ventriloquists in particular are very scary afterwards.
A lot starts at the bar: Eva (Anna Unterberger) and Murot.
(Photo: HR/HR)
The detective’s past life has crisscrossed his cases before, most violently in the legendary episode “Born in Pain”. This time, grainy footage of happier days in Greece hints at a young Murot’s romance, which has made him worry about his karma and, much pragmatism, surreptitiously arrange for a paternity test. The doctor also advises him to go jogging, which makes a new outfit possible. In other words, Murot is intriguingly self-absorbed in his typical way, gliding through the thriller like an emcee, half floating, half stumbling. You can’t say often enough how valuable the colleague Wächter (Barbara Philipp) is at his side, who snaps back at him to reality: “Murot, what’s the matter with you, do I have to do everything alone now?”
Another person with a high sense of reality is in this very confident HRcrime scene (directed by Matthias X. Oberg, who also wrote the book with Lars Hubrich) the company boss Schöller; Philipp Hochmair plays it with a commitment that athletically dances around the brutal. You’re not likely to meet this guy at the Karma bar in the hotel.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m