Das Dorf der Mörder (2015)

One morning at the Berlin Zoo, human remains are found in the peccary enclosure. Young uniformed police officer Sanela Beara is on duty that day and has to assist Detective Inspector Gehring with the investigation. She soon meets animal keeper Charlie Rubin, and the two have an animated conversation. Shortly afterward, however, an unknown assailant knocks Sanela unconscious. The police assume the animal keeper was responsible, and Rubin is arrested. Without much excuse-making, she admits to attacking the police officer and brutally murdering Leyendecker, whom she supposedly sedated with an anesthetic and threw into the peccary enclosure. Psychiatrist Jeremy Saaler is asked to prepare a medical assessment of Rubin, as the police suspect the animal keeper has a mental disorder. Professor Saaler ultimately confirms this and suspects its causes lie in Charlie’s childhood. He therefore contacts her younger sister, who lives and works as a veterinarian at an equestrian center. She tells him that they had both lived in the Brandenburg village of Wendisch-Bruch until she was six, when she went to live with foster parents because their mother had died. Her sister Charlie, then 16, stayed behind, and they had not seen each other for all those years. Only two years ago had she run into Charlie by chance at the zoo. Saaler finds it hard to resist Cara Rubin’s cool charm and begins an affair with her. His concern that this might force him to withdraw from assessing her sister proves unfounded, because Charlie Rubin throws herself out of a window during a moment when no one is watching and dies. Police officer Sanela Beara cannot let the case rest. She finds Rubin’s quick confession, and the case’s apparent resolution, questionable. She hopes to join the criminal investigation department one day and already has a knack for noticing connections. During her inquiries, she meets Professor Saaler and discusses the case with him. After their conversation, Beara is sure that Rubin was not the perpetrator, but was trying to protect someone. The theory that Rubin’s behavior stems from childhood trauma makes her feel a kinship with her, because Beara, too, carries the burden of her past: she had to flee her native Croatia and lost her mother. She promptly sets out to investigate for herself, questioning the few people still living in Wendisch-Bruch. They are all uncooperative, and she uncovers the secret of the Rubin sisters’ past only very slowly. Detective Inspector Gehring is also puzzled by the death of traveling salesman Leyendecker, especially since, several years earlier, one of his colleagues had died in a mysterious car accident. Someone had spilled slurry on a bend in the road, with fatal consequences for the man. To find out more, Beara checks into the Wendisch-Bruch inn. The landlady advises her to look around the old, abandoned Rubin house if she wants to know what happened here 20 years ago. What Beara sees there confirms what a local woman told her: that the place had been a brothel, where mother and daughter had serviced countless men. But Beara cannot find a single man anywhere in the village, so the woman explains: “They’re gone. And whoever isn’t gone is in the cemetery.” The officer does indeed find the graves of four men who died between 1994 and 1995. She informs Detective Inspector Gehring and decides she will leave the bleak village for now. But she never gets the chance: someone shoots her with a tranquilizer dart and carries her off to a hiding place, where she wakes up beside old children’s skeletons. She desperately calls for help, but she is locked in and no one can hear her. Professor Saaler, who blames himself for failing to prevent Cara’s sister’s suicide, has also learned more about the family secret. It seems Charlie had wanted to protect her little sister from childhood onward, and her self-destructive behavior stems from past abuse. He travels with Cara to her childhood home in Wendisch-Bruch, hoping that she will remember what happened. When they briefly stop at the inn, Cara suddenly disappears. Behind the inn, Saaler finds a freshly discarded disposable syringe. He immediately starts looking for Cara and runs into Detective Inspector Gehring, who is also searching for her, since Beara has vanished without a trace. Gehring has already learned that Marten Wahl, the innkeeper’s son, works at the Berlin Zoo and suspects he is the murderer they are looking for. Together, they manage to find and rescue both Cara and Beara, while Marten Wahl deliberately causes a gasoline explosion and dies in it. Marten had always been in love with Charlie, and had killed all those men to protect her. He wanted “it all to finally stop.” Back then, he had already had to dispose of the newborn babies that Charlie’s mother had handed over to him. Years later, he had run into Leyendecker by chance at the zoo, and that sealed Leyendecker’s fate. Charlie knew about it and had wanted to protect Marten.