The film starts with a corpse found in the middle of a clearing. And the murderer is easily found as a woman who always passes this place at exactly the same time saw the murderer's car. It's a joiner who mostly does marionettes. But here the plot only starts. The joiner speaks in riddles taken from (German) fairy tales. And soon they discover another corpse and that a girl that disappeared at the same time is not taken by her father. What makes this movie interesting is the unpretentious way suspense is gained from this fairy tale back-ground and the ironic distance the movie keeps. Eg there is a investigation scene in a small village near Munich and the atmosphere is gained from the similarity of the images to high-noon scenes. The hard light of arriving bad weather and the whistling sounds of the wind attribute to this imaginary. And even better: Differing from far too many German detective stories of the 'Tatort'-series (especially those extremely bad ones with Sabine Postel as Inspector 'Inga Lürsen') the movies sticks to the plot and doesn't give us a lot of information about the existing or not existing private-lifes of the inspectors we don't care to get.
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