Now Robert Karow (Mark Waschke), who was previously not seen as callous in Berlin's “Tatort”, but a certain distance from fellow human beings, has his intimate relationship.
So to speak.
He cultivates it as a technological achievement in the functional smart home, his "Alexa", which as soon as he steps angry, sad or frustrated over the threshold, flatteringly tries to put him into a relaxation mode.
Taking care as an algorithmically organized service, that suits Karow, nobody comes with or close to it. In Japan there are now individualized sex robots. The danger of a crime out of passion is excluded without a corresponding self-learning program on the machine. In the case of “Animals of the Big City”, the eighth case of the Berlin commissioners, that could not be considered so bad at all.
Nina Rubin (Meret Becker) goes to clubs for late night blues, to dance, drink, pick up men. The hangover is guaranteed. Meanwhile, the untamed is conquering the city. At night, groups of wild boars run across the lane in front of the Memorial Church. Crows watch everything but say nothing. Foxes frolic in the outskirts. On the other hand, robots are conquering living space. This becomes clear at the latest when Karow and Rubin find decisive clues for solving the two deaths to be investigated here in a "monster cabinet" for tourists, where they are received by a robot with googly eyes.
This “crime scene” based on the script by Beate Langmaack shows that it wants to be an example and a parable of the modern times.
Interdependencies of a creative and created nature are his themes, artificial intelligence, the (sometimes fatal) deficits of the human species compared to robots and the animal.
The film deals with two murders.
Both are strange and seemingly unrelated, but ultimately have what is essential in common.
It's about a robot barista who delivers coffee convenience non-stop.
The maintenance assistant finds death.
And it's about a fanatical jogger who bleeds to death in the Grunewald after an attack in the dark.
Once in the city center, once in the periphery.
Both spouses of the dead, Rubin and Karow determine, saw their relationships as more ideal than they probably were.
One of the marriages seems very strange, the other full of sorrow: Kathrin Menke (Valery Tscheplanova), the widow of the coffee house owner Tom Menke (Martin Baden), lives in her inner city apartment on litter like in a stable and breeds rare cats for pure pleasure. Reno Gröning (Kai Scheve), whose wife Carolina (Tatiana Nekrasov) did not survive her running program, arranges rompers and baby shoes for the shrine.
The screenwriter Beate Langmaack groups further mirror figures for these couples: A distant neighbor with memory leaps, who had a clear view of the coffee machine glass case on the night of the crime, but cannot classify and clearly reproduce what has been seen. Max Knauer's camera bathes old Albert (Horst Westphal) 's apartment in a twilight, as if from the intermediate realm. Nature blogger Charlie (Stefanie Stappenbeck) sits in the forest, calls holy mother nature and sends video messages of the first snowdrops to her subscribers. In between, there are youthful witnesses, half-beings without empathy, who take selfies with the dead equipment attendant to amuse their friends until the police arrive.
Langmaack's book is not only too obviously working on the topic of "Future 4.0" in terms of the geometric personnel line-up. Their technology skepticism also introduces a single figure, an inventor and programmer who verbally describes the benefits of robotics (prostheses, dangerous and boring activities), but it hardly allows him to take shape. The computer scientist and engineer is just a keyword.
The director Roland Suso Richter, meanwhile, makes the most of the template. He finds cinematic sensual images and settings that help theory from head to toe. As a suction and mysterious association sequence of nocturnal cityscapes and their accelerated mobility, the prelude is already convincing (cut by Patrick Wilfert). The atmospheric sound wash is provided by the electronic music by Nils Frahm. This is not a “symphony of the big city” like Walter Ruttmann's, but, counterpointing the subject of technical skepticism, a machine-generated “sound of the big city”. The staging skillfully turns a clear book into an ambiguous future issue.