This review was published for the first time when the Tatort first aired on November 1, 2019. Well, to repeat the case on Sunday evening in the first, we publish the text again.
The high mass of bourgeois hedonism is the weekly market and, as it is in markets, it is also important here to make decisions under uncertainty. Who just unpacked wholesale boxes and rearranged their contents? Who really let the potatoes grow up in regional soil with loving care? It’s about appearance and being and in this crime scene from Münster the two fall far apart. The current edition of the West German scoreboard, it can be read that “the honorable market master Wagner” has extended his contract by five years. The housekeeper balances this tray with breakfast and breakfast reading next door, she doesn’t get far, not even with words: “Tomorrow Mr. Wagner … Mr. Wagner?”
In the background, Teddy Pendergrass sings “Don’t Leave Me This Way”, and the way Wagner left the world was an abbreviation: death by poisoning. “Licorice” is the second of the first three cases in which Inspector Thiel (Axel Prahl) and forensic doctor Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) are investigating in Münster this year. Licorice is also the sticky gum that holds this film and its ramifications together so that they can be enjoyed. Boerne and Thiel squeal less than usual and do not get lost in slapstick as often, but without completely renouncing both. The book by Thorsten Wettcke is consistent and so is the direction by Randa Chahoud, who once directed the great scifi satire “Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot”.
In this overall good film, Chahoud succeeds above all in sewing a second level of time in a meaningful way with the present. It goes back in phases to 1979, when the very young and already tipsy Karl-Friedrich made his first appearance as a tutoring Smurf for the somewhat older Monika Maltritz. Monika’s mother was soon hanging in the attic, Monika’s boyfriend at the time, Bernhard, is now a geriatric nurse in a facility that also houses Monika’s father, who in turn is a customer of Thiel’s father and his hash taxi. The son of Monika and Bernhard, in turn, is in a relationship with the daughter of the Dutch liquorice retailer Bellekom, who recently surprisingly received a market license from the now dead Wagner. In other words: the liquorice connects a lot with a lot and, as it is its kind, it sticks in the figurative sense more tenaciously than the people involved would like.