Der Tote am Strand (2006)

From a young age, Rosa, like her siblings, suffers under the pressure and humiliation inflicted by her father, who has few friends himself because of his particularly domineering nature. When she can no longer bear the pressure, she emigrates to the United States to finally start a new life, free of all the painful memories of her childhood. More than a decade later, as the day approaches when her father will celebrate his 70th birthday, she decides to return to Germany and talk with him about everything she went through with him. She also hopes finally to make peace with him and forget all the humiliations he inflicted on her. But things turn out differently: When Rosa arrives in Germany, she finds her father dead, sitting lifeless in a beach chair. A bullet struck him right in the heart; he was shot. Suddenly, Rosa realizes all the wrongs her father committed during his life, not only against his own children. A father who, for example, drowns a cat in front of his daughter, sends his son a dismissal notice, forces his other daughter to have an abortion, and calls all his sons-in-law “wimps” has probably accumulated more enemies than friends over the course of his life. Given these circumstances, it seems clear that the murderer must be someone in the family. Rosa is initially suspected, too. It also emerges that her father had an affair with Liselotte Petersen, whom he met every Saturday. Her mother, meanwhile, is secretly involved with the driving instructor, Carl. On the day of the murder, Carl was also at the beach and witnessed Ole shoot his father-in-law during a scuffle. The day before, a letter from Rosa had revealed to Ole that his wife, Regina, had been forced by her father to have an abortion 15 years earlier, leaving their marriage childless. Ole drew the wrong conclusions from this and shot Friedrich Liebmann. When Ole is identified as the perpetrator, he rushes home to Regina and retrieves the murder weapon from its hiding place. Rosa arrives and tries to protect her sister by claiming that Ole killed himself. Regina, however, admits to the crime and is taken away.