It starts well: Hannes Guggenbauer junior (Robert Stadlober) drives his Puch moped to the local bank. With a loan he wants to modernize the farm and hotel in the Carinthian Alpine community and make them more attractive. But he cannot provide the security that the bank demands. His father – Hannes Guggenbauer senior (Helmut Bohatsch) – prefers to sell the family property bit by bit in order to make a good life for himself. For example with a swanky monster car. It’s just stupid that the senior, drunk and drunk, wrecks the new vehicle in front of the inn – and therefore has to hand over his driver’s license to his sister-in-law, the village police officer Martina Schober (Jutta Fastian), and her boss Georg Treichel (Peter Raffalt).
After just a few minutes in the “Landkrimi: Waidmannsdank” – a joint production by ORF and ZDF – it becomes clear: Not only is a very special dialect spoken here, the mountain backdrop is also the only idyllic thing about the setting – if you can hear it despite the forever overcast sky sees something. Like in front of the house of Jäger Ernst Huber (Arnold Dörfler), in front of which, for some inexplicable reason, his wife is always standing.
[„Landkrimi: Waidmannsdank“, ZDF, Montag, 20 Uhr 15]
After all, the weather fits the mood, because policewoman Schober has to bring the woman the news of her husband’s death. He wanted to shoot a deer early in the morning – but one rung of the high seat was loose; in the fall the hunter was impaled by a branch. Schober and Treichel quickly recognize that there is more to the alleged accident. The village police asked for support from Klagenfurt.
A wise decision, because it will not stop at the one act of violence. And with Chief Inspector Ilse Acham (Pia Hierzegger also wrote the script, directed by Daniel Prochaska), an investigator comes to town who is not related or friends with everyone. In fact, one should speak of enemies anyway. There is no shortage of motives for a crime, just as there is no shortage of potential murder victims, because after all, it is not even certain whether the attack was aimed at a completely different hunter. Because there is also a poacher who specializes in protected ibex.
There is little sense of love for the countryside in this country thriller
The clichés in “Waidmannsdank” cannot be overlooked, the implicit criticism of the narrowness of village life in the mountains is so exaggerated that it immediately takes the edge off. Not only in Corona times, people are ultimately drawn to places like this, urban exodus and rural love exist in Austria as well as elsewhere. In addition, the human and, above all, the interpersonal is emphasized in this “country thriller”. Whereby nobody seems completely sympathetic here. Rather, compassion is the highest of feelings. But perhaps that is precisely why the second rural thriller from Carinthia offers an enjoyable change from the usual thriller fare, comparable to the Austrian “Tatort” with Adele Neuhauser and Harald Krassnitzer. Incidentally, this is not the first time that this is true of the country thriller. Incidentally, this time the film was shot in Mölltal.
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The fact that the figures – this applies particularly to the four members of the hunting club – sometimes turn out to be very woodcut-like does not detract from this. In addition to the killed hunter and Hannes Guggenbauer senior, there are the supervisor Flattacher (Johannes Flaschberger) – a grunt in front of the man – and the squat taxidermist Harry Weinisch (Michael Pink). Lonely together seems the common motto: The Guggenbauer-Hannes senior, because although he stole the Flattacher’s wife, she died a little later, Hannes junior was only five years old at the time. In the meantime the junior has grown up, but he didn’t make it to a wife or girlfriend either. Maybe cook Betti (Karolina Lodyga) would be the right one. The selection isn’t that big in a small Alpine community, his aunt, the policewoman Schober, knows that too, and she somehow missed the moment to find the right one.
After all, there is no Viennese abuse in the Carinthian Alps, people speak plain language here. Nobody has to fool the others, the mutual animosities have been fermenting for too long, even if you still meet in Gretl’s bar. There is no reason to keep up appearances; rather, the viewer will witness how the tensions reach their climax, have to discharge themselves in order to bring about the collapse of the fragile fabric of the village community. For some it is about farm and home, for others it is about their hunt – which is as much the basis of life as it is an essential reason for existence.
By the way, “Waidmannsdank” was nominated for the Austrian film and television award Romy 2021 – for the adaptation of the folk song “I tuawohl” by Herwig Zamernik alias Fuzzmann. How fitting, because it looks a lot gloomy too.
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