Der Knochenmann (2009)

The story begins in Bratislava, where an incident occurs in a brothel: a pimp is thrown out of a first-floor window by an apparently angry customer. His friend Evgenjev, however, manages to photograph the license plate of the fleeing assailant. Shortly afterward, Brenner is commissioned by his friend Berti, who works for a car-leasing company in Vienna, to collect overdue lease payments from the painter Horvath, who is supposedly staying at the Löschenkohl inn in Styria. On the drive there, Brenner opens the convertible’s roof, causing it to tear off. When he arrives in snow-covered Klöch, he encounters resentment and silence. Neither the innkeeper nor the waitress will tell him anything about the painter’s whereabouts, even though the leased car was parked outside when Brenner arrived. Then the junior boss, Paul, who thinks he recognizes Brenner as a private detective, offers to have him conduct surveillance: the innkeeper—Paul’s father—is making a conspicuously large amount of money disappear from the business. Brenner initially refuses to tail him, but spends the night at the inn because of the cold and the missing car roof. That night, Evgenjev turns up in Klöch and tries to blackmail the old Löschenkohl. He had thrown the pimp out of the window, and the man is now supposedly dead, but there is a video recording of the incident. The next day, the waitress pays Mr. Horvath’s overdue lease payments, and Brenner is about to leave again. But after meeting Paul’s wife, Birgit (Gitti), he decides to stay for a while. Paul, however, has since decided he no longer needs Brenner’s help, but fails to follow his father, who withdraws 20,000 euros and takes it to Bratislava. The blackmailer considers that too little, though, and demands Paul’s Porsche as well. Meanwhile, Brenner helps Gitti and also sees the bone mill in the basement, where meat scraps are processed into chicken feed. The following evening, Evgenjev turns up in Klöch to collect the Porsche, but Paul is out in it. When the blackmailer threatens to sell Valeria, the prostitute who is the innkeeper’s lover, to a brothel in Turkey—or have her murdered in a snuff video—the innkeeper kills him and dismembers the body in his basement butchering room. But Ana, the dead man’s girlfriend, who had been waiting in the car, catches him in the act. As she flees, pursued by Löschenkohl, she drives off the road and her car overturns. The innkeeper eventually pushes the wreck, with the badly injured woman inside, into a stream, where she drowns. The dead man’s flesh is made into goulash, which Brenner eats. The next morning, Paul happens upon the wreck and finds a bag inside, which he takes. At home, he discovers the death notice of the Bratislava pimp and a videotape showing his father committing the crime in Bratislava. Paul now wants to blackmail him too and demands that he hand over the inn, but the old Löschenkohl has nothing but contempt and sarcasm for his son. By now, with Brenner’s help, he has “rescued” Valeria from the brothel and brought her from Bratislava to Klöch. Paul goes to the police to report the incident and presents the death notice as evidence. But the police officer is annoyed and leads Paul into a side room, where the supposedly dead pimp is. It turns out that the man only broke a leg when he fell from the window, so the blackmail was based on a lie. The pimp, who had come to Klöch himself after Ana was found, persuades Paul to take him to the old Löschenkohl so he can finally find out what happened to his missing friend Evgenjev. Brenner initially knows nothing about any of this, as tender feelings are developing between him and Birgit. But when he finds a severed finger in the butchering room, he begins to wonder. He thinks the finger might belong to the painter Horvath. Meanwhile, the exasperated Berti also travels to Klöch by train and taxi to collect the convertible himself. As a grand costume ball is held at the Löschenkohl inn, the mysteries gradually unravel: the waitress reveals that she is Horvath, who had wanted to hide from her creditors at Löschenkohl’s until undergoing gender-reassignment surgery. Berti falls in love with Horvath and has the expensive operations explained to him in detail. The old Löschenkohl offers to contribute to the costs, since he is to receive the erectile tissue in return. The pimp and Paul meanwhile call the innkeeper down to the basement, but he overpowers them both. The pimp is killed with a captive-bolt pistol and hung in the cold-storage room beside sides of pork; Paul is tied up. Meanwhile, Brenner goes to his room with Gitti and hears screams from the basement through the open windows. He discovers Paul, bound, and the hanging pimp. When the innkeeper arrives, he and Brenner fight, and Brenner’s little finger is chopped off. Brenner survives thanks to Paul, who has freed himself from his restraints and stabs his father in the back with a butcher’s knife. However, in the final scene before the fatal stab, when the old innkeeper stops tormenting his victim, it remains unclear whether he would really have killed Brenner. The police eventually put an end to the carnival celebration. Birgit leaves Paul and drives away with Horvath and Valeria. Rather than let the emergency services take him to the local hospital, Brenner decides to go with Berti in the convertible to Meidling Accident Hospital to save his chilled finger. The film ends with Brenner and Berti stranded because of a breakdown on a Vienna motorway, waiting for an ambulance or a helicopter so Brenner can get to the hospital in time. Differences from the novel: The plot was changed substantially for the film adaptation and differs in many respects from the novel. Josef Hader explains this in an interview with TBA magazine as follows: