Ukrainian series on ZDF: From a darkened country

It's amazing what a discrepancy there is between the symbolic, i.e. free, and tangible solidarity with Ukraine.

Well-intentioned support can even be slightly humiliating.

On its sideshow for the young, hip programme, ZDFneo, ZDF is including the Ukrainian crime series “Hide and Seek”, which was co-produced by the ZDF studios in 2019, and, as the press office loudly says: “about the Ukrainian creatives to support".

The broadcast is “flanked” by “calls for donations”.

Perhaps in order not to immediately arouse desires, an accompanying debate is included in the ZDFneo program: "Should our solidarity with Ukraine be unconditional?" One would have thought that this was already part of the concept of solidarity.

Otherwise it would be a barter.

In order not to be misunderstood: Of course, the Ukrainian creatives deserve all the support.

But the broadcast doesn't need such a smugly moderated and almost apologetic sounding justification: "Hide and Seek" is a tough, aesthetically consistent and extremely exciting genre series, whose protagonists are perhaps a bit too elegiac, but which most German television crime thrillers loosely plays on the wall.

A child's joke becomes bitter seriousness.

A father can't find his seven-year-old daughter with whom he was playing hide and seek in their own locked apartment.

It soon becomes clear that she has been kidnapped.

And she is not the only victim.

The father, who doesn't have a flawless slate himself, but almost nobody here does, suspects a sect,

the Church of the Immaculate Nativity, where his ex-mother-in-law is active, behind the kidnapping.

But he can't explain why.

Dark driving forces within society

What's almost never there in Hide and Seek is wide clarity.

All the streets are covered in fog, all the interiors appear lightless and discolored bluish.

Something menacing hovers over the run-down places.

The dimly lit concrete gray makes even the few noble rooms appear cold and forbidding.

Noir series aren't kept that resolutely dark and demure in this country.

The veristic visual language of the director Iryna Gromozda and the cameraman Serhiy Krutko is more reminiscent of Franco-Belgian productions, but at least in the four out of eight episodes made available in advance it does not contain any drastic depictions of violence.

Also, the enigmatic, which is definitely constitutive, is not overstretched into a mystery plot, but rather blamed on dark driving forces within society.

And yet Gromozda doesn't just allow himself a hint of "Twin Peaks" to start with, when a car drives through a seedy factory landscape - it's Enerhodar with the gigantic, today world-famous Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in the background - and suddenly a richly vibrating bass guitar tone sounds, that nudges Angelo Badalamenti's famous "Twin Peaks" soundtrack deep in the back of his mind.

The photo of Laura Palmer in David Lynch's masterpiece may be reminiscent of the soon-to-be-kidnapped girl hanging on the refrigerator.

And also in "Hide and Seek" you can see flickering fluorescent tubes everywhere.

The investigators are cool too

Right at the beginning, the investigator Maksim Shumov (Pyotr Rykov) is demoted by the head of the police station (Yakiv Kucherevskyi) for a misdemeanor because of his colleague Valery Bondar (Mikhail Troynik), who is more deeply involved in the drug business.

Instead of Bondar, who awaits a difficult fate, the loner Varta Naumova (Yulia Abdel Fattakh) will be at Maksim's side in the future.

She also has to cope with a trauma like Maksim, who lost his twin brother while playing as a boy.

Corruption is a central theme of the series.

Purchasability has eaten its way deeply into the society shown.

This is of remarkable relevance, given that Ukraine, portrayed here as post-Soviet poor and anything but flattering, was considered the most corrupt country in Europe before the war.

And yet "Hide and Seek" is also a time capsule, because the Ukraine shown in it is still intact on the outside.

There are no tank barriers on the streets, and there are no sirens regularly driving the residents into bunkers.

The country had many internal problems and a smoldering conflict in the east, but at the same time it was on the right track.

It gets downright creepy when you realize that just on the streets shown, on which Maksim and Varta are chasing after the kidnappers with great style and soon get in the way of their own colleagues, the Russian conquerors advanced murdering and pillaging shortly after the shooting to take control of Europe's largest nuclear power plant, which provides the series' menacing, fog-shrouded backdrop.

The "construction site" in turn,

It's almost as if the production were playing hide-and-seek with the viewers.

We closed our eyes for a moment and counted to ten: After that the whole country had disappeared.

And nothing was left but bitterness and sadness.

But there is one more thing that connects the investigators in the series, which is compellingly written by Simor Glasenko and absolutely worth seeing even without any sad topicality, with the defenders of today: giving up is out of the question for them, even if it is the last thing they do.

All eight episodes of

- Dangerous Hiding Game will be shown on ZDFneo on Saturday from 10 p.m.

Then 30 days in the media library.