Alles Fleisch ist Gras (2014)

Chemist Dr. Anton “Toni” Galba is the operations manager of the Dornbirn-Schwarzach wastewater treatment plant (ARA). He is having a secret affair with his colleague Helga Sieber. This leads to an argument between him and his employee Roland Mathis. Galba pushes Mathis away; Mathis falls down a flight of stairs and dies. Galba then reports Mathis missing. The investigating police officer, Chief Inspector Nathan Weiß, a former schoolmate of Galba’s, finds photos on Mathis’s hard drive showing Anton Galba having sex with Helga Sieber. Weiß suspects that Galba killed Mathis for this reason and disposed of him in the plant’s grinder for catering waste. But instead of arresting him, Weiß asks Galba to help him with his own agenda. Weiß is having an affair with Adele Stadler, who was abused by her husband, construction contractor Ludwig Stadler. Galba lures Ludwig Stadler to the ARA, claiming that Weiß is on his trail and urgently needs to speak with him. There, Weiß beats him up. In the news program Vorarlberg heute, presented by television journalist Ingomar Kranz, Ludwig Stadler’s death is reported as a suspected suicide. He is said to have embezzled some of the company’s assets for personal use and to have been involved in a corruption scandal surrounding the construction of the new state hospital and city construction councillor Wilfried Karasek. The program also reports on Hans Summer, who took the law into his own hands and fired a pellet gun around the Tunnel, a bar known as a drug-dealing venue. Hans and Gitti Summer had lost their daughter to heroin addiction, and the couple feel abandoned by the police. Weiß next sets his sights on drug dealer Konrad Mugler, whom he has so far been unable to bring to justice. Anton, however, no longer wants to help Nathan with his further plans, so he contacts Ingomar Kranz. He wants Kranz to report that Weiß murdered Ludwig Stadler, but Kranz refuses because there is no evidence. Galba is also afraid of becoming Weiß’s next victim. Kranz, meanwhile, suspects that Ludwig Stadler faked his suicide to get out of trouble, since Stadler’s body was never found. Galba promises Kranz a video as evidence. Kranz himself is being pressured by city councillor Karasek: if he continues reporting negatively about him, Kranz could be the one to lose his job in the next restructuring. Galba sends Kranz footage from the wastewater treatment plant’s security camera showing Weiß disposing of a body wrapped in cloth in the plant’s grinder. A woman can also be seen helping Weiß dispose of the body, but she cannot be identified. Galba suspects that it is his now former lover, Helga Sieber, who has since also quit her job at the ARA. Confronted with the footage, Weiß admits to Kranz that he disposed of Mugler’s body and that of his bodyguard, Warlam, at the plant. To keep Kranz from publishing the story, he offers to dispose of city councillor Karasek for him—a man whom Weiß has spent years unsuccessfully trying to prove corrupt. Ingo accepts the deal, but afterward fears that he will appear on video footage disposing of Karasek’s body. While reviewing the footage, Galba notices a jump in time. Anton’s wife, Hilde Galba, is friends with Gitti Summer, who runs the organization KMD—No Power to Drugs. Weiß introduces Hilde to Kranz as the person who helped him dispose of Mugler and Warlam’s bodies. Nathan and Hilde ask Ingo to act as an oversight for their future plans; the next person they have chosen as a target is bank director Baumann. Shortly before a family tragedy in which a father shot his wife, child, and finally himself, the bank had called in his foreign-currency loan. Bank director Baumann had talked him into taking out the loan. Kranz has no objection to Baumann being the next target. Weiß has kept the video footage of himself and Kranz disposing of Karasek’s body as leverage to stop Kranz from publishing parts of the story. Chemist Galba makes an explosive and carries out an attack. The radio reports that Ingo Kranz was killed in the attack and Nathan Weiß was seriously injured and is in a coma. During a visit to the intensive care unit, Anton meets his wife, who suspects that Mugler’s men were responsible for the explosion and that she could be their next victim. Anton tries to calm Hilde by assuring her that Mugler’s men were not behind the attack. The next day, she asks him to help her deal with bank director Baumann.