Script with a twist: The Black Forest crime thriller “Schneekind” on ZDF

WHow can you mess up a story like that? The author Annette Reeker (under her pseudonym Anna Tebbe) was inspired by historical events with literary potential. It's about sanatoriums for so-called “cure” or “deportation children” in the 1950s to 1980s, some of which were located in pretty Freudenstadt, in the neighborhood of sophisticated palaces like the Hotel Waldlust.

For many of those “deported,” their stay was torture, exposed to humiliation from stronger children, abuse from the sometimes sadistic educational staff, and abhorrent drug experiments, as the pharmacist Sylvia Wagner and the educator Anja Röhl have explained.

Letting former children in care, both perpetrators and victims, collide harshly with each other in the present is not a bad idea. And hearing scary voices in the ruins of the complex also has something of its own, as it can be traced back to the psychological disposition of the injured.

Psychological rather than magical-spiritual nonsense

This is perhaps the best news about the two-parter “Schneekind”: that this third episode of ZDF’s loose mystery crime series “Ein Schwarzwaldkrimi” (meaning the German variant of mystery, i.e. wooden hammer symbolism and legends) is different from the previous one – “Waldgericht” (2021 ) – pleasantly different in that the magical-spiritual nonsense has been significantly reduced. Unfortunately, it has been replaced by psychological nonsense.

Maris Bächle (Jessica Schwarz) is actually the wrong investigator in the case of the strange murders involving a mobile shock freezer, which obviously refer to childhood trauma. After all, she herself is a psychologically broken cave foundling, nicknamed “the Hauser”. She soon reaches her mental limits, which is why she constantly looks concerned; Flirting with the city archivist doesn't help either.

There's not much left to heal

Desperately determined, she cycles and trudges through the forest, again and again to the ruins of the children's home, where, however, no one plans to look for her when she disappears one day, not even her colleague Konrad Diener (Max von Thun). At the beginning of the film, the two inspect the first dead man in the forest: tied up and frozen (with freezer burn), he sits leaning against a tree, one eye covered with a snowflake obsidian; For esoterics it is a healing stone against negative energies, although there is not much left to heal here. Opposite the dead man – in the middle of summer – a snowman made of artificial snow is melting. More staging is not possible. Bächle/Hauser combines razor-sharp: “Like a production.”