In this Police call 110 the present is as brittle as the poorly compacted shore on the large artificial lake at the former lignite opencast mine near Fehlow. A surfer’s paradise could arise if it weren’t for the advice of a geologist. And if the investigations into the murder of this very geologist didn’t show that the souls of the people of Fehlow weren’t exactly looking at paradise, but at different kinds of darkness.
The episode “Abgrund” by Stephan Rick (book: Peter Dommaschk and Ralf Leuther) is a special Sunday thriller for many reasons. Investigator Vincent Ross (André Kaczmarczyk) in his fur collar coat strides through the immensely wide lake landscape with a shore as sparse as from the moon, as if it were one of those designer shows in places, of which everyone then posts photos on Instagram. On the other hand, Ross is also the pure, newborn present with his cute, always sympathetic look from elegantly made-up eyes, with sentences like “we have to deal productively with cognitive dissonance”. The gender fluid Ross and the very traditional male investigator Adam Raczek (Lucas Gregorowicz) have only been a team in the German-Polish Commissariat Swiecko since January, but what a team. Born in Poland, Raczek is a guy who, after surviving a panic attack with shortness of breath, first reaches for a cigarette. One believes that the two actors are delighted to see how they test very different states of affection, defense and curiosity, sometimes with comedy, sometimes with all seriousness and with a certain irony compared to the crime TV genre. When Vincent shows up at the crime scene with Khol and his somewhat pompous fur collar, Adam raises his eyebrow questioningly, and Vincent interprets it like this: “What are you staring at? It’s faux fur!”.
More people have disappeared in Fehlow than investigators initially think. Bettina Sassnitz (Rosa Enskat, right) has not heard from her daughter for a long time, who is said to have moved to Berlin.
(Photo: Christoph Assmann/rbb)
Unfortunately, that’s the end of it again, because Gregorowicz is leaving the with this episode police call after seven years of his own volition. In his last case, he lets Adam Raczek very quietly drop out of the functioning and become very touchingly silent – about his own reticence, about the futility of his actions, about depression and pills. In a scene with a notable amount of silence between sentences, Adam asks his boss, “How long have we been doing this shit here?” Long, he says. Long, Adam repeats. “So? Has anything changed?” Sometimes he just stands there and looks at the sky.
For a while, Adam still finds support with a woman, whose name must of course be Ewa. Ewa speaks Polish to him, she is a waitress at the hotel in Fehlow, left home because she wanted to put everything bad in her life behind her, she says. But the bad is also in Fehlow, it looks out of teddy eyes, it comes up out of the sand piled up years ago, it squats in the church with the pastor and shows up unrecognized in Super 8 films from the past.
“Abyss” is about people who have become evil and people who suffer from evil. It’s a deeply moral, so it’s a big film.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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