This complex, precise German true crime drama about the real-life killing of two young women is painstaking in its detail. Its pleasure lies in watching the detectives slowly reveal the truth
It’s never a good sign, is it, to see a young woman going for a run in the woods at the start of a gritty European crime drama? The Black Forest Murders takes the real-life killing of two young women in the south of Germany as its basis, and turns it into an extremely thorough police procedural. The detective work here is complex, precise and painstaking, and there is a sense that the film-makers have no wish to spare viewers any of the intense slog it takes to track down the perpetrator (if indeed the police manage to do so).
Nina Kunzendorf is senior detective Barbara Kramer, who grew up in the area but moved to Berlin to make her name in the police force. Now that her father is getting older, and more infirm, she has moved back to her (fictional) small, rural home town in the south, where she is treated as an outsider. Kramer seems like a loner, smokes a lot and is the sort of cop who will slam down the phone when she doesn’t like what she’s hearing on the other end of it. She is your classic TV lead detective. The force at her command are local people who have remained local, and they largely resent her Berlin ways and lack of community knowhow. But she, too, is contemptuous of their amateur methods, small-town gossip and the low hum of sexism that threatens to rear its head again and again. It’s a standard culture-clash setup.
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