Crime Scene “Fear in the Dark” is about three children who abandon their mothers in the woods. Someone has to think about that first. But why?

Teenagers Lily Seifert, Anselm Klem and Deniz Ömer quickly take a selfie when they abandon their mothers in the forest. Photo: Radio Bremen/Claudia Konerding

First a confession: I don't normally watch crime scenes and am therefore a layman when it comes to crime stories. As a child, I loved snuggling between my parents on Sunday nights as they paid homage to the German shrines of Lindenstrasse and Tatort. That was a long time ago. I have now watched Tatort Bremen, which will be broadcast on Easter Monday evening for the first time.

I intended to give the crime scene a chance. Maybe the cliché that's stuck in my head isn't true, maybe it's not as bad and embarrassing as I expected.

The crime scene of “Fear in the Dark” is about three children who abandon their mothers in the woods: Hansel and Gretel, so to speak, turned upside down. In fact, mothers wanted to abandon their children in the forest. They call this “dropping” and see it as an uplifting measure: children must find their way out of the forest armed only with a tent, supplies, a compass, and a map. But since it could be a little dangerous, the mothers wanted to try it themselves first. The attempt goes wrong and one of them dies. Murdered the second night in the woods, as the two detectives quickly discover.

One of the investigators is Liv Moormann (played by Jasna Fritzi Bauer). She small and tomboyish, she wears her heart on her sleeve: “Damn forest,” she mutters over and over again, and who would want to contradict her? Her colleague Linda Selb (played by Luise Wolfram) is quite reserved and reluctant to talk about the fact that she comes from the same upper-middle-class background in Bremen that the victim and some of her possible perpetrators come from.

Shake the firearm

There, behind the beautiful facades of Schwachhausen, something is wrong, that's what the creators of Tatort would have us believe. But what unfolds behind it (affairs, intrigue, stalking) seems so forced and contrived that, despite all my good intentions, I can't buy it. The kids first hang out together on a rooftop and at one point wave a gun around.

A garden party in honor of the deceased almost ends in a fight. Unfortunately, all this does not seem authentic at all, but rather as if someone had commissioned an artificial intelligence to come up with the idea of ​​a green-bourgeois family drama between busts of Goethe and grand pianos.

The film repeatedly recalls the three women's deadly logging expedition. One of them receives a visit from her lover to kiss for a moment. It's just stupid that they are being watched: what happens in the forest, doesn't stay in the forest.

When the kids aren't threatening each other with guns, they are somehow constantly in the woods, sometimes to scare their mothers into taking their compass, and sometimes to look for them because maybe it wasn't a good idea to take the compass away from them. Of course, there has to be a chase in the woods. Finally, the dramatic final scene in slow motion, with moving music: bingo!

Due to the lack of current comparative values, I can't rate whether this crime scene is better or worse than average, but I hope it's the latter. It left me feeling dull and uncomfortable. It was embarrassing.