This review was first published for the premiere of the crime scene published in October 2020.
This crime scene from Stuttgart is regionally provocative, because he lets Swabian entrepreneurship morally go to hell. What is striking is that apart from a woman who wants to go upstairs and dies right at the beginning while jogging in the forest, there are only men in this thriller. The two detectives Bootz and Lannert, Bässler, the company boss, his security chief Neumann and a broken man named Manlik – far and wide only men. That was stated without any value. Doesn’t matter either, because there’s plenty crime scenes exist in which only women investigate and all the main roles are played by women. Ok joke. Back to the Swabian middle class.
“The World’s Wage” (directed by Gerd Schneider, author Boris Dennulat) doesn’t tell a funny story, but the funny ones crime scenes don’t play in Stuttgart. The constellation is clear from the fourth minute and it is noteworthy that it remains exciting. Bässler’s ex-employee Oliver Manlik comes back from Florida after three bad years in prison. The company has held him solely responsible in a US court for paying bribes where he was really just a small number. The life he led in Stuttgart no longer exists, his wife and son don’t want anything to do with him, and he goes to the boss of the company rather uneasily because he wants reparations. This Manlik, who was an arrogant careerist, is now a shaved-headed human with tattoos and push-up muscles. “Economy is war,” says CEO Bässler once at a central point, and Manlik is the war returnee with the flickering in his eye.
Lannert (Richy Müller) and Bootz (Felix Klare) are particularly straightforward investigators this time, which suits them well. But this men’s thriller develops into a duel between Manlik and Bässler, who are unscrupulous in different ways. Of course, the investigators are looking for a perpetrator, but then Manlik becomes colder and more dangerous for Bässler, who in turn seems more and more nasty. An explosive device and a contract killer come into play, and the question of the perpetrator changes – for one crime scene quite original – quickly into another: Who is the victim here? As Manlik, the actor Barnaby Metschurat very remarkably balances a character who is constantly on the brink between more or less objective negotiations for justice and pure amok.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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