"Tannöd" or "The Murder Farm", a title that explains a lot more about this film than the German, is a German-language co-production between Switzerland and Germany from 2009, so it is actually not that long anymore until this 90-minute movie has its 10th anniversary. The director is Bettina Oberli and she is also one of the writers who adapted Andrea Maria Schenkel's novel for the screen here. This is the story of a young woman who returns to a village to bury her mother and while she is there, she finds out about a horrible crime that happened a while ago and is still unsolved. This is where the problems start for this movie. Honestly, Julia Jentsch (who I really liked in Sophie Scholl) never ever makes an impact with the character where you would say that her presence does actually move so much in finding out the truth about what happened. Lets keep in mind that police officer did not succeed, but Kathrin's appearance does? Sorry, but I never believed that for a second. Jentsch was either miscast or the character was written in a way that just wasn't working out at all. In the letter scenario, you cannot blame the actress, but admittedly Jentsch also did not elevate the material. Other cast members include Volker Bruch, who is equally bland, and Monica Bleibtreu (mother of Moritz yes) in the last performance before her death. Bleibtreu is more memorable, but this also has more to do with the way the character was written and the makeup/costume than really with Bleibtreu's performance.
It is a crime thriller movie and the core component about these is always that you need to care for who the characters are, the suspects and really long to find out who did it. This is not the case here. This is also because they just included way too many characters (the townsfolk) instead of keeping the number down and elaborating properly on these. Topics like incest, sexual abuse, discrimination and even Down Syndrome are randomly thrown in and it feels as if it was all done to shock people and to be as controversial as possible. However, the outcome lets the writers look really desperate as they never managed to build an interesting, realistic and convincing story around these shock factors. Extremely disappointing. As I already wrote in the title of my review, the atmospheric touch, also the colors, work nicely in favor of the suspense element, but it is really the only memorable factor in these 1.5 hours. In my opinion, there was a lot more done wrong than right and this is quite a pity as the subject could have made for a good German thriller movie. But I have to give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.
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