Crime novels will stop at nothing for their story, although the corpse itself rarely plays a significant role. She is found and may still be in pathology later and cannot defend herself when the investigators are cunning. The Zurichcrime scene does it differently this time, the corpse gets the full staging. She is wrapped in plastic and hangs from the ceiling of an old hall by chains. And stares.
In their third case, the Zurich investigators Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher) and Ott (Carol Schuler) come across the internationally hyped artist Kyomi, who shears young unstable people bald, tattoos their faces and eyeballs and lives as a guru with her “objects” in a commune . “Sometimes your face doesn’t match the person you’ve become,” says Kyomi, and that resonates with Ott’s inner life – the investigator has radically, if not quite successfully, renounced her upper-class origins. “If I no longer recognize myself in the mirror, will that free me from myself?” She doubts, and Grandjean cuts this short: “If you no longer recognize yourself in the mirror, you need glasses.”
“Schattenkinder” is a classic whodunit that would like to be a shocker in its drastic nature. In addition, several motif levels are drawn in: not only Kyomi transforms bodies, but also the plastic surgeon Gessner – whose son Cosmo hung from the ceiling dead, prepared and tattooed on his face. Cosmo was a victim of sexual violence as a child. On the other hand, what Kyomi, harassed by a greedy gallery owner, is doing with the bodies of her “objects” smacks of abuse. “So this is your art?” calls Grandjean. There is no fear of applause for particularly shallow clichés against the art world.
Kyomi and her “objects” bid farewell to Cosmo.
(Photo: Sava Hlavacek/ARD Degeto/SRF)
The third case of the Zurich team headed by Christine Repond, director, and the authors Stefanie Veith and Nina Vukovic is told with powerful visuals and is coherent on an abstract level. But you don’t get emotionally close to the characters of this modern horror fairy tale.
Grandjean and Ott remain the most promising at the moment crime scene-Team. They are empathetic, don’t talk a lot, see their husbands occasionally, live normally melancholy lives; meanwhile there are hints of what her grand narrative might be: the moral portrait of the cold, rich city whose children are looking for liberation.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.