Sky series "The Pass" with Julia Jentsch: The generally inhumane

It usually does not take long for the big talk-over-talk to rise when Austrians and Germans meet. Especially when the collision of German correctness and Austrian laissez-faire occurs not in the coffeehouse, but as part of a joint professional challenge. You can understand the Salzburg Commissioner Gedeon Winter (Nicolas Ofczarek) quite well when he says at a corpse find in the middle of the Alps: "German passport, German problem."

Of course he does not get away with that, because the series "Der Pass", which premieres on Friday at the pay-TV channel Sky Deutschland, forces the national characteristics of Germans and Austrians together and sends Winter together with German Commissioner Elli Stocker (Julia Jentsch) the search for a mass murderer.

Night black and abysmal

This series, however, grows from episode to episode beyond, quickly overcomes the very tiring butchering of alleged national peculiarities and ends up in a shockingly tragic way in the general human. Or rather: the generally inhumane. Standard television, night black and abysmal.

It was not foreseeable. Although the previous Sky production "The Boat" impressed as a classic update, but seemed by their proximity to the big role model as a project with safety net. Like "Der Pass": again, not a real new development, but a retelling of "The Bridge", the phenomenally successful Danish-Swedish series, which broadcasted the ZDF in 2012 and has already imitated at five other borders.

So it's not really original, if the script of the directing team Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert (collaboration: Mike Majzen) as a starting point for their story, a corpse on the landmark of an Austro-German Alpine Pass. Especially since the investigating commissioners initially come as a changing national clichés: Winter as a drunken melancholic with acute job aversion, Stocker as a staid official with desire for the first major case of career. She: "We have to find the right way." He: "The right way leads past the ass."

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The first victim is a smuggler responsible for the deaths of migrants. Soon, a second, a prominent entrepreneur, and it is already uncomfortable for the team of investigators, because now the media rise a large.

A case for sobering up

Evidence that "The Passport" is more than the remake of a working formula, is shown by the becoming complex main characters. Winter is a wounded loner, a Wolfgang Ambros listener, who supplants his childhood with alcohol and drugs. A giant of man, whose prancing movements indicate his vulnerability. In the course of the case he is more and more outraged, he thinks to find a new meaning in it.

Disillusionment also learns the figure of Ellie Stocker, but under completely different omens. At first she is friendly-binding, always has a "good job!" on the lips, an "Oh, thank you" and "I like to help". There will not be much left of that soon. The affair that she has with her boss (Hanno Koffler), becomes public, failures in the investigation do not want to break, and finally the policy eludes Ellie the line. Rarely has a character who enjoys all the sympathy of the viewer so consistently trampled by the events.

At the same time, the intensity of the crime story moves from episode to episode. "The Passport" does not reinvent the genre of the serial killer thriller, but how frighteningly skillful the creators here are to arrange the lusciously well-known ingredients is sensationally exciting. The dramaturgy borrows above all in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven", arranges their material consistently over the entire narrative period of just under eight hours and worked out in this time open spaces.

The killer is soon known to the viewer, and a feverish search for a telltale will be a masterfully elaborate psychological crime drama, which is still good for surprises in the last 15 minutes.

"The Passport" is embedded in a complicated Today, a right-wing politician and a YouTube influencer appear, it is about isolation, the power of the Internet and digital surveillance fantasies. However, these facts are still in the face of the powerful mourning that man is still a wolf to man. And the world is not a place that forgives.

In Wolfgang Ambros's song "The Darkness" it gets light in the end, "ma makes himself light and sighs". Not so in "The Passport". The darkness, it lives in us and never leaves us free.

"The Pass", from 25 January on the pay station Sky Germany