“Tatort” from Dresden: I see you, but you don't see me

A lack of visibility is currently high on the socio-political agenda.

Whoever demands to be seen, whether justified or strategically asserted, is concerned with participation and representation.

One comes to the conclusion that in the “Tatort” women behind the camera, in the direction and in other central trades still do not play an appropriate role.

In terms of the content of the “Tatort” films, things have changed in the meantime.

In the flagship of German-language crime entertainment, the visibility and invisibility of women - and men - repeatedly play prominent roles.

It's about murderers who either don't want to be seen or absolutely want to be seen.

Perpetrators, including victims, to whom, for whatever reason, the supposed happiness of others seems unattainable.

In the end, it was not the “crime scene” that shone here, but the Rostock “Polizeiruf 110” with “Sabine”.

Otherwise there are crimes that are very difficult to shed light on.

Pathologists who make events visible from wounds, supported by images that reconstruct delayed visibility, especially in flashbacks.

Often riddles and puzzles of events that play with light and dark, with expectations and disappointments and involve their audience.

Crime on the meta level

Occasionally, the creative processes themselves become game material.

As in the “Tatort” by director Sebastian Marka with the descriptive title “Meta”.

Sebastian Marka also staged the new Dresden “Tatort: ​​Invisible” (book Michael Comtesse, camera Willy Dettmeyer, music Thomas Mehlhorn).

At first glance he is a more classic Whodunnit, and it is precisely in this respect that he shows dramaturgical weaknesses.

On the second it is more than a little "meta" and offers strong female roles.

In the good as in the bad. 

Commissioner Peter Michael Schnabel (Martin Brambach) has not only got used to the concentrated power of his team Karin Gorniak and Leonie Winkler (Karin Hanczewski and Cornelia Gröschel), he is also concerned about them. His presumably innate acidity is now focused on the new pathologist Jonathan Himpe (Ron Helbig). That is a thorn in his side, but can contribute constructively to the case. Schnabel doubts that there is even a case. Sudden cardiac arrest in the young, healthy café owner Anna Schneider (Milena Tscharntke), something like that happens, he says.

Not the perpetrator, but parts of the story are open to the audience - the undoubted murder story has to do with the psychological terror of an invisible stalker. Incredibly increased pain sensation, hidden baby monitor for eavesdropping and misleading, secret photo zooms and video recordings, threats from landline telephones (which you logically need in order to get straight to a suspicious cancer research laboratory via the location determination) - lots of mini-facts and details that are still in the policeman's picture do not appear, but are present with the viewer. In and on Schneider's corpse, however, there is no evidence of killing. 

Before it could get really confused with all the visibility and invisibility, Winkler commits a breach of trust. You and Gorniak have secret certainty that Anna Schneider was murdered. Gorniak has the same symptoms that a friend of the dead reported. Sudden, unbearable, perhaps psychosomatic pain, which she cannot cope with even when she visits regularly in an “angry dream” (euphemistically: “I'm doing yoga”). Someone sent her videos of a party twenty years ago. Someone wants to be seen, threatens on the phone with a truth that will come to light. There is a trace. In the laboratory of Professor Mühl (Matthias Lier) Schneider's ailing ex-boyfriend, Nils Klotsche (Christian Friedel), works as an assistant to Martha Marczynski (Anna Maria Mühe) on nanobots - tiny,hardly detectable particles that inhibit tumor growth and switch off pain receptors. Pharmaceutical research in the discreet.

The perceived eeriness of nanomedical procedures, therefore a dream of the future, and the search for the motif that connects Schneider and Gorniak, and Gorniak's time at the police college, also connects “Invisible” in the last third concisely and fast-paced to the chamber play finale, in which the stalker invisibility doubled, too tragic significance gains.

In the end, this “crime scene” shows a certain size.

What is overlooked can grow, like anger, or heal, like nanomedicine one day.

“Invisible” does not inspire all along the line, but it plays on the seeing and being seen complex convincingly.

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