A great sadness settles over Berlin. There is an empty desk, a policeman has just packed up the last things, in the end women’s boxing gloves. The professional life of commissioner Nina Rubin (Meret Becker), it fits in a small cardboard box. Her colleague Robert Karow (Mark Waschke) stares at the blank space across from him in the office, his eyes red-rimmed. Rubin, ultimately also his lover, died in his arms, shot by a Russian mafioso. Karow is completely off track, should go on vacation to get by again. He doesn’t go on holiday, not an official one, because his childhood friend Maik is lying in the woods with the corners of his mouth cut and a bullet hole in his forehead. A murder in the milieu, that’s what it looks like.
The dead man had worked as an undercover investigator, was a driver for a Turkish clan boss whose brothel bar, curiously enough, had music by Steely Dan running. The colleagues from the Kripo send Karow away, the prosecutor Sara Taghavi (Jasmin Tabatabai) talks to him like a small child. Karow nods, thinks: Fuck off! – and carry on, alone. Steals the key to the dead man’s apartment from the evidence room, lies in Maik’s bed, drinks his whiskey, smokes his cigarettes, reads his diaries, crawls into his former self to find out why his friend had to die. The search for a motif becomes a search for Karow’s youthful self, for a faded love, for the shackles of a middle-class family home. Flashbacks with scenes from his youth and the recent past structure the thriller The victim. The viewer is omniscient, no investigator explains who did what where, everything can be seen.
This crime scene, written by Erol Yesilkaya and directed by Stefan Schaller, causes physical pain. Commissioner Karow howls throughout the film, and the clan boss often has tears in his eyes. Everyone suffers terribly and lights cigarettes with matches. It has been a long time since people smoked so much on a Sunday evening. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen so many men cry. It can get on your nerves, the howling, the smoking. But if you are not a block of ice, it touches you. Can you allow it? Christmas is coming soon.
The first at 8:15 p.m.
You can find more series recommendations here.