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Inspector Tessa Ott (Carol Schuler) and zookeeper Mario Fuchs (Dariusz Holzer) in the monkey enclosure next to dead chimpanzees. © Sava Hlavacek/SRF/dpa
“Shit moon” – with this exclamation the Swiss “crime scene” begins, where there is a lot of murder and a lot of yawning. But that has nothing to do with boredom, on the contrary.
Zurich – A chimpanzee, an animal keeper, a ne’er-do-well and his wife: things will get really bloody in Zurich at the Swiss “Tatort” crime thriller this Sunday (8:15 p.m.). The fact that the murder is linked in a particularly exciting way is already documented, so to speak: the episode “Of Apes and Men” won the special screenplay prize at the German television crime film awards in March even before it was broadcast. “Bizarre and grotesque but never out of the ordinary,” said the tribute.
How can this series of murder and violence even be connected? Commissioners Isabelle Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher) and Tessa Ott (Carol Schuler) have their hands full. But they’re not really into it. It all begins on a full moon night and both of them hardly closed their eyes. They are so sleepy that while investigating at the zoo, Ott falls asleep in front of a pool with swimming elephants and they both treat themselves to a nap together on a spare bed in the hospital.
There is a lot of humanity in this crime thriller: the eternal verbal class war between Ott from a wealthy family and Grandjean from a humble background is enriched by a facet. And the cool inspector Grandjean suddenly shows criminal energy herself.
But let’s start from the beginning: It starts off scary, with a chimpanzee being stabbed. The next victim is particularly devious and hunted down with a nail gun. At some point the fat murderer hangs over a toilet bowl, having shot himself, and his wife doesn’t live long either. Every time Grandjean and Ott finally want to sleep, another body is discovered. It takes a long time for them to find the common thread, but that doesn’t matter because the entanglements are so exciting. Actress Sarah Viktoria Frick is particularly good, playing both a dead and a living person at the same time.
In 2020 it was doubted whether the then new “crime scene” from Zurich with its many strong women could hold its own. Grandjean/Ott replaced a classic man-woman investigative team that solved a total of 16 cases in Lucerne from 2012 to 2019. In addition to the strong female duo from Zurich, there is also public prosecutor Anita Wegenast (Rachel Braunschweig), who makes a special appearance in this episode: she gets caught between the fronts in the Zurich political circle. She needs the elegant chairwoman of a zoo support association for her hoped-for promotion, but it is precisely this woman who falls into the shadows during the investigation.
At the award in March in Wiesbaden, the jury of the TV Crime Prize praised the script by Stefan Brunner and Lorenz Langenegger for the tension in a “perfectly thought-out criminal case”. The ending is also surprising. dpa
2024-04-13 22:38:23
#monkeys #people #Tatort #Zurich
