Tarpaulins, scaffolding and barriers everywhere. At the police headquarters, near crime scenes, on the street in Mainz. There’s a stalker running around there who wants to drive women first into despair and then into suicide. His life is a construction site, that becomes clear in the course of the crime thriller “Out of the Dark,” and somehow it was crime scene There’s always one from Mainz too. There will be five episodes in six years this Sunday. That’s so little for the time that you hardly had a chance of getting past the getting to know phase with Chief Inspector Ellen Berlinger (Heike Makatsch). Especially since in the first episode she was still investigating in Freiburg and only then was she transferred to Mainz. Now it’s over, the SWR saves it crime scene, for cost reasons. The other crime novels from Stuttgart, Ludwigshafen and the Black Forest are allowed to stay.
Berlinger never relied on luck in the investigation, but rather on her natural skepticism
It’s actually a shame, things had come full circle in Mainz. The first woman investigated here from 1978 to 1980 crime scene. It was Chief Detective Marianne Buchmüller, played by Nicole Heesters. Not all colleagues liked the fact that she led the murder investigation, so resolutely and self-confidently, and even more than 40 years later, Ellen Berlinger still encounters male bastions of power in the presidium. A police officer with a broad grin wishes her good luck in finding the stalker. “Lucky?” she asks him, stunned. She never trusted that in her investigative work, but rather her natural skepticism. She leads Berlinger on the trail of the misogynist who stalks more and more victims and in the end also pins the inspector’s photo on the wall in the industry-standard basement quarters with a lot of technology.
Berlinger largely has a solo role in the film, which was directed by Jochen Alexander Freydank and written by Jürgen Werner. Because Chief Inspector Rasche (Sebastian Blomberg), her partner in the job, has signed off by telephone. Irritatingly, as Berlinger notes: forever. Investigator Lukas Wagner (Ludwig Trepte) steps in, along with patrol officer Thomas Engels (Andreas Döhler), who knows a lot about other stalking cases in the area. Too much? The trail actually leads to the presidium, but to whom exactly is unclear in the first half of the film. This is the fast-paced, exciting part of the crime novel. In the second half, the perpetrator is known, too early actually, now it’s about convicting him and understanding the sick reasons behind his power fantasies. Ellen Berlinger follows this psychogram as she came. Without a big bang. But consistently with strong play. One would have liked to get to know her a little better.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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