Reviews

I saw Margarete von Trotha's movie: Ingeborg Bachmann - Reise in die Wüste with great interest. The many negative reviews doesn't do justice to the movie because it highlights something that very few films dare to show with such clarity: that men and women don't fit together when they both work creatively. The movie shows that there is a female artist in Ingeborg Bachmann who is in a certain way humanly superior to the man, even if his name is Max Frisch - in the level of understanding, perception and finding words.

Vicky Krieps plays Bachmann, but too much in the quiet tones and colors that Bachmann doesn't really have. Just listen to her radio interviews, where Bachmann speaks in a very firm and brilliant voice. None of that here. Vicky Krieps is probably a phenotypically well cast, but vocally too lukewarm.

Ronald Zehrfeld, on the other hand, plays Frisch in a very courageous way as a toxic man who wants a housemaid, but not the competitor he sees in Ingeborg Bachmann, whom he has to envy and whose success he reacts to in a grumpy, moody and jealous manner.

Zehrfeld, one of the most important German-speaking actors of his generation, is perfectly cast here. We particularly hope for him to have many challenging roles in the future.

Overall, Trotha has made a very good and reliable film in which she courageously takes sides with a vulnerable artist who was stuck in a toxic relationship for far too long. The film's images are strong, sometimes too poetic, which is why they sometimes seem kitsch, sometimes too dignified and twisted.

So, one point is deducted for the vocally weak Vicky Krieps, who is playing too much at the moment and could use a break. As an actress, it's important to make yourself scarce.

The second deduction is for the poorly done, cheesy score and the poor sound mixing. One would like German films to have mixtures like those in the USA or France, where a score does not cover up and drown out the dialogues and conversations, but rather underscores them where necessary. The film was impossible to fully understand, which I particularly regret for a film that lives primarily from the spoken word.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be a masterpiece, despite it's potentials inherent in the material, but it was a good piece of craftsmanship that is definitely worth looking at.

Kristin Derfler is one of the most exquisite screenwriters in the German movies and series world. Most of her work is stunning and surprising: her dramaturgically excellent and elaborated plot, in which she has always her characters, and, of course, the viewers in mind - bot at the same time, what is the basic for this master piece. She never falls in the trap in which most of the current writers for TV or movie are falling: Not to kill her Darlings, she always does. And this is another stone in this wonderful gem.

It is of course a risk, but one that Kristin Derfler implements excellently here. Not every crime show succeeds in which the figurative drawing and constellation is so densely placed and in which such strong distrust of the main suspect of a future crime is sown from the outset. Everything so close, everything so seemingly clear, and then again not. To the viewer's great delight, the author leads the audience through the "manege" several times with the nose ring in order to surprise them again and again.

In literature it is said that an author has to love his characters. Kristin Derfler deals with this love sparingly, she distributes it situationally and iridescently and tells us a big story of a thousand losses based on the motor of skills and motivation of her characters: lost opportunities, lost lives and lost love, without us getting tired of these topics.

Because she tells it in a new way. With a very interesting woman, a police officer in her forties, with two almost grown daughters, one of whom fell victim to a psychopath six years in the past. This psychopath is released early from prison against her warnings and without warning her, and begins to wreak havoc a short time later. She tells the story sparingly, but in strong, drastic images - without pointing the camera directly at it - we will probably never forget how, viewed from the outside, the screws of an electric screwdriver drill through the wall of a caravan, with the blood of the person running down them, that has previously been tied to the inner wall by Dennis, the Killer.

Anne Ratte-Polle is one of the best German actress of her time. She plays the role of the policewoman who first has to sort out her own life before she can properly solve cases, has this role written specifically for her. She has it so much incorporated, like a female Robert Deniro, she shines with her understatement, with her anger, which she rarely gives free rein to, with her grief for her lost daughter. And about her lost love, who jumped into another woman's bed when she needed that love the most. Her Ex: A coward, a wimp, a yes-man and a nay-sayer, played by Renato Schuch. He is someone who likes to lecture his ex and comes across as big, someone who is fantastic at mansplaining and who still always wants to be the best in his class, a life nerd who doesn't deserve a woman like her. And yet she loves him. We cannot understand why.

Anne Ratte-Polle is surrounded by a great cast who give her a lot of support and scope and with whom she knows how to exploit her theatrically fine acting skills. The two young daughters, two pubescent girls with their needs for recognition and happiness, played sensationally fresh by Lea van Acken and Josephine Tiesen. Senita Huskic, another young actor, is also great, turning a small supporting role into her own show as a fine but robust, streetsmart and courageous police officer who always stands by her colleague. I was pleased to see the always elegant and distinguished Ann-Kathrin Kramer again as an ophthalmologist who takes the risk of taking in the psychopathic killer and who plays her fear excellently. And finally Anton Draeger as Dennis, the psychopathic murderer who can't stop and who puts everything on the line to hurt others because he believes that's the only way he can save himself.

Kristin Derfler, the mastermind of this gem is also the showrunner and creative producer of this show. Thanks to her wisdom and to her training as an actress, this show has the honesty and strength of dialogue, the inner dramaturgy and lines that many technocrats on the drawing board of the show industry lack. Not only does she know how well the acting is done, she lets her characters, aka actors, act in a way that the viewer doesn't expect.

Kudos to the score of the show, to the editing, the set design, the direction and to the great camera, which is not afraid of high aerial shots and flights, and too close ups. The camera always knows a bit more than us, like the raven in the first scene. It finds the right tone, the right warmth, the right attitude and the images for this intense, moving drama.

For me "Two sides of the Abyss" is the strongest German series since Dark, and therefore a triumph for Kristin Derfler and Anne Ratte-Polle and their creative team that this show has conjured up. We can only congratulate these two strong standing women and wish them many more series and large formats so that especially Kristin Derfler can continue to channel her power of dialogue with her imagination, her love for her players and her dramaturgical knowledge into new works for small and big screen, as a screenwriter, show runner, producer and probably as a director.