Toter Mann

New film by the maker of the justly lauded Die innere Sicherheit/The State I Am In that was screened in Rotterdam last year. This film is also told with a steady hand in an almost classical style. In very precise, clear and tranquil shots, it evokes a continual and repressed tension. Christian Petzold directs the actors with a directness that helps tell the story with the utmost conviction and excitement.The story is about a lawyer, Thomas Richter, who meets a beautiful woman, Leyla, at the swimming pool one day. Thomas is not the most handsome or the youngest, but Leyla seems to fall for him anyway. After she has spent one night with him, she disappears from his life without trace. When a little later Thomas visits a client, Blum, a man who had served a lengthy jail sentence for murder and was receiving psychiatric treatment, he happens to see Leyla again. She works in the canteen of the company where Blum has been put to work in a resocialising programme. It is some time before Thomas realises that this is not a coincidence. When the danger becomes apparent to him, he doesn’t have much time left.With this refined murder story, Petzold places himself without hesitation in the great tradition of Alfred Hitchcock.