“Your charm is overwhelming.” For a long time, the saying in the fortune cookie was the only nice thing that happened to chief inspector Adam Schürk (Daniel Sträßer). An SMS from “Drecksau” interrupts the company outing of the “Tatort” quartet from Saarbrücken in a Chinese restaurant. Adam please come, it’s about his mother, writes “Drecksau”. Under the unflattering name, Schürk saved the phone number of his father Roland Schürk (Torsten Michaelis), who regularly beat him up as a child. The inspector cannot reach his mother by phone, so he sets out to see his father without telling his best friend and colleague Leo Holz (Vladimir Burlakov) or the inspectors Esther Baumann (Brigitte Urhausen) and Pia Heinrich (Ines Marie Westernströer) why.
The no longer entirely new “Tatort” team is blown up in the third film. Adam Schürk went into hiding after his father bled to death after being shot in the abdomen. Once again, a “crime scene” commissioner is suspected of murder, which was almost the rule lately. Schürk’s fate was also shared by Frank Thiel in Münster and Charlotte Lindholm at the Udo Lindenberg guest performance in Hamburg. In the ARD program planning, the Sunday thrillers now seem to be sorted by topic groups.
[„Tatort – Das Herz der Schlange“, ARD, Sonntag, 20 Uhr 15]
Whereby the screenplay idea of a commissioner perpetrator does not appear more plausible in any “crime scene” than the one from Saarbrücken. Adam Schürk is a victim of blatant father violence and connected to his friend Leo through a traumatic experience. When they were minors, they almost killed Roland Schürk, who had beaten his son uncontrollably. For a long time the father was in a coma. After waking up, he appeared purified, it seemed as if there could be a rapprochement. But now author Hendrik Hölzemann takes the father-son-friend drama to the extreme. With the death of the father, ballast is thrown off, now things could really get going in Saarbrücken, where the inspectors behind the conspiring male duo have remained quite pale.
The goal: get more young people excited about the “crime scene”.
In the episode “The Heart of the Snake”, Hölzemann and the young director Luzie Loose bring the two female characters more on an equal footing. Esther Baumann, who doesn’t shy away from conflict, drives Adam and Leo into the parade, which gives the story a decisive turn. Loose, who told a critically acclaimed coming-of-age story about two girls in her feature film debut, “Swimming,” describes herself as a “Tatort” fan. Her goal is “that more young people watch the ‘crime scene’ again”. Young female directors are often offered films with more “female connotations” in established formats. “What I really liked about the project was being able to gradually reduce this distribution of roles.”
In fact, “The Heart of the Snake” – the best of the Saarbrücken films to date – is an exciting, dark thriller drama. The trap that the father, who is suffering from cancer, sets for his son is somewhat outlandish, but imaginatively constructed. How is it supposed to work, shooting yourself from a meter away with your son’s service weapon? While Adam Schürk does not show up for work the next day after visiting his father in the evening, the remaining trio is first called to another crime scene. A woman was killed in an apparently failed burglary attempt, one of the burglars was seriously injured. The money in the safe was not stolen. In the background, a man who turns out to be lawyer Jens Modall (Michael Rothschopf) pulls the strings in front of numerous surveillance monitors.
[Alle Folgen des True-Crime-Podcasts Tatort Berlin des Tagesspiegels finden Sie hier]
TV audiences are usually a step ahead of the police, but not far enough to solve all the mysteries. It has also proven to be a wise decision to dispense with the usual wrangling over competences between different departments. Although the LKA takes on the case of the allegedly killed Roland Schürk, not a single LKA investigator appears in the film.
The script and staging concentrate entirely on the team led by Leo Bäume, who is pursuing the case because he wants to exonerate his friend. In the last third, the film turns into a tough prison drama that has painful surprises in store. So it can continue in the western “crime scene” outpost.
