Absolute silence, and then the crack of a door, footsteps in the snow, the clack of a wooden gate. “The Fog Man” is the name of this thriller, and of course the fog also appears in it, even in the first shot. But much more elementary, especially in the dubbed version, is the tone that strengthens the feeling of disorientation. The film adaptation of the bestseller “Der Nebelmann” by Donato Carrisi, who also wrote the screenplay and makes his debut as a director, is basically a radio play: a telephone rings, a garage door rattles open, later rain patters, steps creak, hard drives rattle and metal becomes Pulled smacking through a bleeding wound.

As a radio play, however, one would miss Federico Masiero's camera.

She, too, elevates the events into the unreal, with Masiero presenting the scene of the action, a remote place with a tourist past, using a city model in the semi-dark museum of local history.

Confusing situation

A girl disappears in this place, the sixteen-year-old Anna Lou, daughter of the religiously spoiled Kastner family.

And the “special investigator”, agent Vogel (Toni Servillo from the movie “Gomorrha”), who in a small framework with a blood-stained shirt in front of a psychologist named Augusto Flores (Jean Reno from “Léon - the professional” and “The pupurnen Rivers ”) sits and is questioned.

First of all, we take Flores for an investigator.

The situation does not become clearer when the plot jumps back a few days and other people appear like the over-the-top sensational journalist Stella Honer (Galatea Ranzi), who invades the village with the entire hysteria machine of Italy, or Loris Martini (Alessio Boni), a teacher. Martini has not lived long away from the mountains, but he does look like Reinhold Messner en italiano and thinks with his students about the evil in literature and reality with his students, of all times at Christmas time.

Aha! Agent Vogel, who moves into an empty old swimming pool with his people, is quick to mistake Martini for the culprit, and the public gets wind of it. Still, the evidence could be deceptive or even criticized - either by Mattia (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), an autistic student who follows girls with his video camera, or by Vogel, who owes his fame to Stella's media circus. “If you talk,” Vogel says to Mattia in a basement scene, “I'll make you famous.” A crow crashes into the glass at the office window of the psychologist Flores.

Toni Servillo, who plays a cynic who is capable of anything, and Alessio Boni, who mimes the teacher in a cautious, thoughtful manner and precisely for this reason can keep him in limbo between a potential kidnapper and a victim of media society, wear this film.

In the original it bears the title “La ragazza nella nebbia”, ie “The girl in the fog”, and differs from German productions in about the same way as Italian everyday fashion differs on both sides of the Alps.

So clearly.

The film music by Vito Lo Re leaves a mixed impression.

In successful moments, in which the tension arises from the plot, she washes the images with powerful dark violins and wind instruments.

But often it pushes goosebumps way too bombastically.

One has to be critical of that, if only because the professional branch of film composers has discovered a new love for orchestral soundtracks through the leap in quality of so-called “virtual”, i.e. sampled and definitely affordable instruments.

Whether real or digitized musicians were used for the orchestral tracks in “Nebelmann” cannot be said and is irrelevant.

The point is that orchestral music that is supposed to create the impression of “great cinema” must neither press nor clutter up.

Otherwise you won't hear the noises that have always been decisive for the undiluted thriller atmosphere.

The Nebelmann

runs at 10:15 p.m. on ZDF.