This house is really cold. It is spacious and extensive, and the garden, as inspector Karin Gorniak (Karin Hanczewski) soon discovers, is actually a small park. But something crucial is missing. homeliness. In each room there is a display that plays music or answers questions on demand. Sort of like Siri or Alexa, just a little bigger.
Gorniak and her colleague Leonie Winkler (Cornelia Gröschel) were sent here by their supervisor Schnabel (Martin Brambach) – they actually wanted to celebrate Gorniak’s upcoming birthday with several bottles of alcohol in the trunk and 80s music. This music continues through the events, only nothing comes of Gorniak’s birthday party. Because in the bed in the house Schnabel sent her to, a huge pool of blood opens up.
The “Tatort” from Dresden – staged by director Anne Zohra Berrached based on a screenplay by Christoph Busche and her – is entitled “The Cold House” and, especially in the first half, it takes place almost continuously in this very strange-looking place .
Gorniak and Winkler soon find more bloodstains, they are several weeks old and cover the entire bathroom floor. But where is Kathrin Fischer? And what happened here – in this cold house?
For a long time it was not clear where the narrative thread would lead. The team starts going in circles, not moving forward, and everyone swears about this difficult case. At the same time, something resonates that seems to affect the two inspectors as well as their boss. Fischer is desperate in the face of his wife’s disappearance without a trace, and initial suspicions against him ultimately do not seem to be confirmed. Then Fischer’s mood changes. He yells and shouts, becomes abusive, loses his temper.
At one point it is said that Fischer idolatrously loved his Kathrin. The Fischers’ mutual best friend, Beate Lindweg (Katharina Behrens), who was with Simon Fischer before Kathrin and knows both very well, also makes increasingly contradictory statements about the couple. Something is obviously not right with this very best friend. But by then it’s really too late.
“The cold house”, an initially almost hermetic chamber play in one setting, increasingly opens up the space for other rooms and goes outside in the second half. The hermetic, with something very strange underneath, opens up, but this negative pressure, which can always be felt, remains.
The Dresden inspectors Gorniak and Winkler examine the inner life of the Fischers more and more thoroughly and come across more and more oddities and abnormalities. Gorniak is particularly emotionally affected by the case, as she is reminded of her own childhood home. It’s not a good memory at all.
It’s the chasms that open up bit by bit in the Fischers’ marriage that remind Gorniak of a bygone era. Abysses that may lie in every human being. Pretty much at the end it’s Leonard Cohen who can be heard with his hit “Hallelujah”. You know what the great singer mostly sings wistfully and urgently about: about faith and about love. From their power, from their futility too. From the pain that she so often brings with her. Then the birthday balloons make their way out of Gorniak’s car and rise into the sky. “And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.”
