This doesn't start well.

Simon Kessler calls back, but no one answers.

The mobile phone that receives his call lies abandoned on a sailing boat that is adrift at sea.

Nobody is on board.

A woman's shoe floats in the water.

The sky is gloomy, the sea treacherous, and the music clearly emphasizes that something ominous has happened here.

The message that the LKA man Kessler had previously received from his former colleague Hella Christensen does this anyway.

There is something like a death throes, an exhausted, plaintive sigh.

Why was Kessler late in responding?

Now he's getting started, he's going full throttle from Hamburg to the Baltic Sea, to Nordholm.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".

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Hella Christensen and Simon Kessler worked together to solve murder cases that had shaken the community from the ground up.

In Nordholm everyone knows everyone or someone who knows someone.

But suddenly nobody trusts the other anymore.

This was especially true for the first story, in which Barbara Auer and Heino Ferch were on the road in the role of the two serene investigators in fictional Nordholm: "Death of a Girl".

This two-parter from 2015 stood out from the MordenimNordenroterei that ARD and ZDF are now coming up with, stood at the beginning of the case collection in which corpses lie on the beach, the wind howls, people stare blankly at the sea and monosyllabically answer the questions of grumpy commissioners answers.

Dead girls on the beach, the wind is blowing

In "Death of a Girl" it worked out in an atmospheric way, the only drawback was that the plot and background were very reminiscent of the British series "Broadchurch".

The first-class cast wore the two-parter, for the follow-up film "The Disappeared Family" (2019) this also applied, in the third round, the two-parter "Das Mädchen am Strand" (2020), the paint was off.

The narrative scheme repeated itself, the relationship dramas followed the same basic structure.

This is especially true for the now running two-part series "The Woman in the Sea".

Heino Ferch once again plays the jaunty commissioner Kessler, who shows a clear edge in his job, but maneuvers around in his private life.

He is with the bookseller Silke Broder (Anja Kling), the mother of the girl who was found dead on the beach years ago.

Their relationship status has not really been clarified, especially since Silke's husband Hauke ​​(Patrick von Blume) shows up.

The parents worry about their daughter Charlotte (Lilly Barshy), who carries a secret that she still doesn't reveal even when she finds her classmate Viviane dead in the woods (right behind the beach, where else).

"Before you decided to be a good person"

From the start, Kessler and the new police chief Lena Jansen (Isabell Polak) realized that the disappearance of the police officer and the death of the girl were connected.

She has just come from Frankfurt and first of all makes an announcement to her new troupe in the barracks yard tone that Kessler plays to her.

The two fit together perfectly.

"You like it.

It reminds you of yourself before you decided to become a good person," says Jansen's colleague.

After she and Kessler traveled long enough in cars from one crime scene to the next and one witness interview to the next, things settled down enough that Jansen feels they work quite well together.

"I don't think," says Kessler, "there should be more than one of us on the team." And he's right about that.

Because if that is a reference to a sequel, you can only advise against it after these three hours.

The exercise is over, the dynamic is gone.

One suspect, one broken man or one card cheater after the other appears (all top-class cast with Ann-Kathrin Kramer, Leslie Malton, Ulrike C. Tscharre, Stefan Kurt, Hary Prinz and Max von Pufendorf).

One relationship drama follows the next, everything is connected to everything else, but unfortunately we have seen and heard it all several times - elegiac images like those of the cameraman Gunnar Fuss and sentences like those from the wooden dialogue box by Thomas Berger, who is responsible for writing and directing.

There is always a clue in the right place, a new witness or someone with the right calendar verse ready to underline the tragedy of life in general and in Nordholm in particular.

The latter part is almost given up as a caricature for Gustav Peter Wöhler in the role of the hotelier Uwe Han, as he sits there by the fireplace and waits to give his guests advice or, quite incidentally, the decisive clue to solving the case.

It's all very, very worn.

But it doesn't wear anymore.

However, it could be that ZDF sees it differently.

This is indicated by the final picture with Anja Kling and Heino Ferch on the high seas.

The woman in the sea

runs today and tomorrow, each at 8:15 p.m., on ZDF.