"Tatort" from Ludwigshafen: Raw violence and misogyny: This case brings Lena Odenthal to her limits

Child and career: For the investment banker Ann-Kathrin Werfel, this is not mutually exclusive.

"Tatort" from Ludwigshafen: Raw violence and misogyny: This case brings Lena Odenthal to her limits

Child and career: For the investment banker Ann-Kathrin Werfel, this is not mutually exclusive. As managing director, she successfully runs a company and takes care of her five-year-old son with equal commitment. After signing a lucrative contract, a colleague wants to celebrate with her, but Werfel refuses - she wants to go home quickly. However, she never gets there. The 39-year-old is attacked by a stranger in the company car park and kidnapped in her own car. Her body was found the next morning. Commissioner Lena Odenthal (Ulrike Folkerts) and her colleagues are appalled by the brutality of the crime: the young mother was burned alive. Two men are targeted in the investigation: Werfel's ex-husband Patrick (Jonathan Müller), who is accused of domestic violence, and Bundeswehr soldier Hans-Joachim Kessler (Götz Otto), who claims not to have known the victim. What unites both of them, Odenthal suspects, is their abysmal hatred of women. The evidence is thin and time is short when a second woman is kidnapped.

The film focuses on Chief Inspector Lena Odenthal and Captain Hans-Joachim Kessler, who meet in an hour-long interrogation and verbally duel. There are two adversaries par excellence: On the one hand, the misogynist creep who can't stand the fact that he has a woman as his superior and generally complains about all the "gender nonsense" in society. On the other hand, there is the tough investigator who has fought her way to the top in a male-dominated domain and who repeatedly offends with her idiosyncratic manner. In strong dialogues, screenwriter Stefan Dähnert discusses important topics that have recently been considered in several "crime scenes": violence against women and femicide. According to the victim protection organization "Weißer Ring", a woman in a partnership is killed on average more than every third day in Germany.

The course of the story is essentially predictable with few surprising twists and turns. One or the other plot twist could have provided even more excitement here. Instead, there is - again - an involvement of the chief inspector in the plot. That the investigator becomes the victim - this point of view has been taken too often in "Tatort" for more than 50 years and is really no longer a new idea.

Chief Inspector Johanna Stern (Lisa Bitter) has been investigating alongside Lena Odenthal since 2014. Recently, the two have become more and more of a team at eye level. But in this case, the roles are unequally distributed. Stern makes amateurish beginner mistakes, sometimes seems unprofessional and easily manipulated. In the end she is almost degraded to a supporting character.

It is the first new Sunday thriller after the summer break. At the start of the season you can tune in.

Inspectors Odenthal and Stern also investigated in these cases:

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