Netflix series
The cellar in the head: The dark Netflix series “Dear Child”
The actors Kim Riedle as Lena (lr), Naila Schuberth as Hannah and Sammy Schrein as Jonathan in a scene from “Liebes Kind”. photo
© -/Courtesy of Netflix 2023/dpa
A woman escapes from an underground private prison. But her long torment doesn’t end there. The film adaptation of a bestseller by Romy Hausmann descends into ever darker depths.
It was all so horrible, now everything could be fine. Or not? One Woman wanders through the dense, endless forest at night, somewhere in the dark no-man’s land near Aachen (NRW). During her headlong escape in her nightgown, she runs in front of a car on the forest road. The woman in her mid-thirties only survived her first moment of freedom thanks to emergency surgery. But that is by no means their biggest problem.
The man who once kidnapped her in a remote private prison, who forced her to follow bizarre rules, who raped her, she obviously killed this man in a fit of anger. And she soon realizes that this nameless one and his terrible basement still have power over her. The Netflix series “Dear Child” begins where other material has a happy ending – and this is where its nastiness begins.
The secret star of this six-parter is the child actress Naila Schuberth (“Dangerous Proximity”), who was born in 2011. In the dark six-part series she plays the role of twelve-year-old Hannah, who is picked up unharmed by the rescue workers at the scene of the accident. Her little brother, on the other hand, is still left in the horror cellar.
Once fathered by the kidnapper, Hannah knows nothing other than his prison world, enriched with knowledge that comes from Brockhaus and home schooling. For both – crude rules and knowledge of the world – she is a model student. She raises both palms in greeting. Hannah: “Your nails have to be clean and you can’t hide anything in your hand that could hurt yourself or someone else. That’s the rule.” The child, saved together with the woman in the forest, remains opaque. Is it an angel or a messenger of evil?
Also haunting is the appearance of Hans Löw (“I’m your human”) as an LKA investigator and former neighbor of a kidnapped woman. Is the woman lying unconscious in the intensive care unit in the clinic possibly Lena from Neuss, who disappeared in 2010? 13 years without a single hot lead and now such a gift from God? Lena’s parents also cling to this hope and are soon plunged into a rollercoaster of emotions in which even the DNA tests lead to more scary questions than answers. The template of the same name for “Love Child” comes from Romy Hausmann and was one of the most successful crime novels of 2019, the book also won the Crime Cologne Award.
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