Die Heimsuchung (2021)

After a botched police operation in which police officer Ben tried to free a child from captivity, he wakes from an induced coma. He is deeply troubled by the fact that he was unable to prevent a little girl from dying during the operation. Ben is plagued by nightmares and visions, and his girlfriend Marion persuades him to go with her to the Baltic Sea for a few days to visit his parents, whom he has not seen for many years. At the same time, this means returning to a place filled with painful childhood memories. As a child, he lost his best friend here, who had an accident while they were playing; the circumstances of the incident were never properly clarified. To his great astonishment, Ben learns that his friend Timmi, with whom he once swore a blood-brotherhood oath, is not dead at all, but has been in a persistent vegetative state ever since. Ben’s parents had supposedly wanted to protect their son, and so they told him that his friend had died. Ben is extremely angry about this, since his girlfriend Marion is a doctor and even specializes in coma patients. Marion immediately examines Ben’s friend at the clinic and asks to see the results of his previous examinations. She is convinced that an extremely traumatic experience must have put him into this comatose state. This awakens Ben’s investigative instincts, and he sets out to get to the bottom of the matter. He hopes that Timmi will wake up if he uncovers the truth. Strangely, just as Ben is about to look through the old police files on the accident, the village police station’s archives explode. This strengthens his conviction that someone is obviously trying to cover something up. Ben’s investigation takes him so far that he discovers a cellar beneath Timmi’s parents’ farmhouse, leaving no doubt that children were held captive and possibly abused down there. Ben is therefore convinced that Timmi’s sister must have been abused by their father there, and that Timmi happened to witness it. He also finds a doll of himself there, which, according to his parents, Timmi always carried around with him—but Ben has no memory of it. Meanwhile, Marion succeeds not only in detecting brain activity in Timmi, but also in getting him to use this activity to answer questions with “yes” and “no.” Ben now hopes his friend can confirm his theory, but this comes to nothing. Instead, Timmi suffers a setback, and Ben is thereafter plagued by intense delusions. The dead girl he was unable to save during the previous police operation appears to him everywhere as a ghostly apparition. He fears that the events of the past few days may have taken place only in his head, because both the local police officer and his parents tell Ben that he was to blame for Timmi’s accident. Tormented by doubt, he confronts Timmi’s father in a surreal scene. The father now confirms that a child who had been kidnapped in Berlin really was held in his cellar, and that the kidnappers had forced him to hide the girl there. Timmi’s sister, meanwhile, confirms that her father beat her, but never sexually abused her. Ben comes to realize that he himself does not exist, but is merely a product of Timmi’s imagination: his girlfriend Marion is actually Romina, the physiotherapist treating Timmi in his persistent vegetative state—Romina is an anagram of Marion—and he himself is the doll Timmi always carried around, which Ben’s “mother” had sewn for Timmi, who often visited their home. Ben now sees what happened back then in his mind’s eye: Timmi had discovered the kidnapped girl and wanted to free her. But when he came out of the hiding place with her, Ben’s “father” and the local police officer were standing in front of them. Before Timmi knew what was happening, the kidnapper shot the girl and ensured, by causing Timmi’s “accident,” that he could no longer talk about it. The incident described at the beginning of the film was merely a transformation of Timmi’s memory of that situation. Ben promises Timmi that he will now let him wake up, and approaches the perpetrators with his gun drawn. At that moment, Timmi wakes from the coma. The fact that the film’s active protagonist and his surroundings turn out at the end not to exist in reality places the film within the category of unreliable narration. In this sense, Ben’s mother’s repeated warning that the truth would kill him proves correct: Ben exists only in Timmi’s imagination; in reality, he is not alive at all.