Der Fall des Lemming (2009)

Leopold Wallisch (Fritz Karl), nicknamed “Lemming,” was fired from the Vienna police force at the urging of his contemptuous colleague Krotznig (Roland Düringer). He now works for a small private detective agency in Vienna and is forced to spy on potential adulterers. When one of the people he is tailing, Grinzinger, a retired Latin teacher, is murdered, Lemming quits and sets out to solve the case on his own. He becomes ever more deeply entangled in a complex web of power and betrayal, sadism and humiliation, whose roots reach back twenty years and which exposes the victim as someone who once victimized his own students. Lemming’s path—which leads him, not least, to confront his own dark side—is lined with a host of strange characters: Grinzinger’s sour wife, who only becomes merry once she is a widow; a butcher who ends up in the meat grinder along with his cheeky piercings; a ship’s cook and French Foreign Legionnaire long thought dead; and, of course, Castro, the stoned dog who never tires of confusing Lemming’s bathtub with his bed and his pillow with the toilet. The search for the killer turns into a race against the brutal Krotznig, who tries by every means to stop his former partner’s investigation. Matters are made no easier by the arrival of a young veterinarian who behaves extremely suspiciously: Klara Breitner (Julia Koschitz) seems not only to be involved in the murder, but soon also sets Lemming’s heart aflutter—in a more personal way. Despite all the obstacles, Lemming still has two aces up his sleeve: his heightened empathy, which at times borders on self-abnegation, and the mysterious nickel-framed glasses that Grinzinger took into the woods in gift wrap shortly before his death.