"Taunus thriller" on ZDF: The children's paradise was pure horror

"We were fine," remembers Ramona Lindemann (Claudia Geisler-Bading).

At that time, the colorful pennants fluttered in the sunshine on the extensive hillside property in Mammolshain, as if every day were Mother's Day.

Happy are those who were taken in as a foster child by Rita Reifenrath (Imogen Kogge) and her husband Theo (Thomas Thieme) in the children's paradise.

Luck that many abandoned children were granted through the close cooperation between the youth welfare office and the Reifenraths.

On which a first shadow fell when a neighbor girl drowned in the pond on Mother's Day 1981.

The day a serial killer was born, as the reviewer later notes.

"We were fine"?

Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that

A happiness that ended when Rita committed suicide in the nineties.

Although actually only her car was found and the body remained missing.

The caring Rita with the Federal Cross of Merit.

The Rita with the sadistic torture methods with which she punished even the slightest offences.

“We were fine” became the survival mantra of the severely traumatized, now adult foster children, among whom must be a compulsive killer who always takes women into his power on Mother's Day, gloats over their suffering and kills them.

When Theo, aged very old, is found dead after falling down the stairs and his dehydrated dog digs up human bones in the kennel, Pia Sander (instead of Felicitas Woll now Annika Kuhl) and Oliver von Bodenstein (Tim Bergmann) enter the scene.

Three drowned women wrapped in cling film lie under the kennel floormat.

In the Hofheim Taunus Commissariat K-11, well known to Nele Neuhaus readers, Kai Ostermann (Michael Schenk) comes across other victims who were murdered according to the same pattern.

Some of the foster children are suspect.

For example, the grandson of the Reifenraths, Fridtjof (Max Hopp), grew up with Rita and Theo after his mother died from drugs and is now an arrogant DAX company CEO snob;

Claas Reker (Cornelius Obonya), who was rejected by Rita and who, thanks to a report from Pia's sister Kim Freitag (Daniela Holtz), spent the last few years in a psychiatric ward and pursued his ex-wife, and Joachim Vogt (Andreas Lust), who made the jump has and is manager at the airport.

Ramona's husband Sascha (Tobias Langhoff), also a former foster child, is a nervous wreck.

Kim disappears after a fight with her partner, Pia's and Oliver's boss, Dr.

Angel (Marie-Lou Sellem), without a trace.

And in Munich a young woman (Camille Dombrowsky) sets out,

The versatile plot of the ninth "Taunuskrimi" film adaptation after Nele Neuhaus (who has a cameo appearance in front of a bookstore, in which she leafs through the books and looks at a fugitive, which will make booksellers just as happy as the film itself) is the known to readers.

Since the books came on TV as 180-minutes in two parts, the restlessness of the first adaptations, some of which was unintentionally funny, has clearly subsided.

One looks in vain for the flair of the Hessian low mountain range, which lives on the one hand from the proximity to Frankfurt and on the other hand from special Taunus conditions.

Here and there a few half-timbered houses between Hofheim and Königstein, scenic properties and drone flights over densely leafy forests, which in reality have recently been severely decimated by drought and bark beetles,

The story of the horror nursing home could play anywhere in Germany.

But it pays off that Nele Neuhaus has reassigned the rights to UFA Fiction.

Most of the time now the threatening atmosphere is in the foreground.

The book was adapted by Annika Tepelmann, Felix Herzogenrath is the new director.

Felix Poplawsky's camera and Christine Aufderhaar's music make the time levels differentiated and atmospherically quite appealing.

The horror of the images is curbed.

The point here is obviously to serve the public with an additional product in the value chain.

It succeeds – mainly thanks to the guest cast.

Kogge, Thieme, Obonya, Hopp, Lust and the others, including Harald Krassnitzer as the taciturn profiler, have only a few appearances in some cases – and sometimes make showpieces from their part. It is irritating that the perpetrator, who was openly identified as a twin in disguise, looks like Peter Handke maybe a little bit.

Maybe it's a colleague's swipe at literature by controversial Nobel Prize winners.

Or not.

The two-part

runs today and on 16.2.

from 8.15 p.m. on ZDF.