Inspector Bukow is history, the penultimate cowboy in the Sunday thriller has ridden away. Now it depends on Faber from Dortmund crime scene and his rancid parka to fly the flag of the cranky loner. Successor at police call in Rostock is Bukow’s half-sister Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann), who has recently been more or less gently introduced to the murder commission on the Baltic Sea.
The fact that she drives a funny Twingo and is a happy person with a slight tendency to be business noodles sets the course: The newcomer to the team has absolutely nothing in common with her odd predecessor, played brilliantly by Charly Hübner. Especially profiler Katrin König (Anneke Kim Sarnau) is perhaps incredibly annoying for this very reason. For the debut, she has baked goods with her, she wears Volksbank chic, König prefers a humming face to a bomber jacket. Can that go well, especially since the women are supposed to lead the investigative team together? No time to think about it, the first dead person is already there.
The question of the culprit was settled after a few minutes
An elementary school teacher meets up with a date at a pub called Knockout, and when the woman is about to go home, her jealous childhood friend is there and shoves her so roughly that she falls and dies. No viewer has to bother with the search for the man who killed the woman, everything is clear in the first few minutes, and then the film already stops being a crime thriller.
It is replaced by the story of the eponymous “Daniel A.”, who was born Daniela Adamek (Jonathan Perleth) and is still seen as a young woman by those around him. On the date with the teacher, he appears as Daniel, and when the police are looking for him and want to question him, he runs away like a wounded deer. He could testify and everything would be fine, he didn’t do anything. But he doesn’t want it because his father, who is a police officer, doesn’t know anything about his desire to be a man. Actually, hardly anyone knows. The father is totally over it since he became a widower and his other 15-year-old daughter had a child. “We’re a completely normal family,” he shouts into the night, and that’s the core of the story by Benjamin Hessler (script) and Dustin Loose (director): The search for normality in a world that doesn’t allow for any deviations.
Jonathan Perleth embodies the leading role incredibly well, it is the debut of a young man who left the acting school in Bern for the police call was cast and who certainly plays the main character’s inner distress so convincingly because he is a trans man himself. It’s good that his story takes up a lot of space in the film, lately there have been too many Sunday detective stories in which an LGBTIQ* supporting character was written into the plot as well-intentioned decor without advancing the story or contributing to more diversity. What falls by the wayside in Rostock is how the characters develop in Bukow’s shadow and Böwe’s cake plates. But the new one isn’t that new anymore.
Police call 110, Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste.
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