Die Toten von Hameln (2014)

Johanna Bischoff, who directs a girls’ choir, is on her way to her hometown of Hamelin, where they are scheduled to give a concert. When she briefly falls asleep on the bus, she is transported back to her childhood and confronted with a dead body. Johanna is relieved when she jolts awake. Of course, while she is there, she also visits her father, Dr. Georg Bischoff, who lives in Johanna’s childhood home with her aunt Charlotte. Before the girls’ performance, they go hiking in the Ith, a local mountain range, together with Johanna and the young organist David Fernandez, with whom Johanna is romantically involved. Four of the girls wander off near the Rothestein Cave and disappear. According to legend, the Pied Piper of Hamelin led children into this cave in the fabled mountain about 725 years ago, and they were never seen again. David Fernandez, who went looking for the girls, also fails to return. Seeking help, Johanna turns to her former boyfriend Jan Faber, who is now head of the local police station. He determines that a collapse has occurred in the front section of the cave, and that it must have happened only shortly before. Heinz Sewening and his team are mobilized to assess the conditions inside the cave and draw up a rescue plan. Johanna’s supervisor, Beate Lange, arrives and bitterly reproaches her, culminating in the threat that she will have to fire her. She says Johanna should pray to God that this ends well, or neither Johanna nor she herself will ever be able to enjoy life again. The parents of the missing girls arrive as well. Johanna, who is already emotionally unstable, is devastated. After she falls asleep, a call on her cell phone wakes her. It is the missing Ilka Peters, stammering that everyone is dead. Then the call cuts off. When Johanna takes another look around the area, she happens upon Ilka, who is completely confused. Ilka says that Marie screamed, and then the whole earth came down. At the hospital, Ilka is diagnosed with severe shock and two minor sprains. Johanna asks her father, Hamelin’s former mayor, for information about an archaeologist named Rudmann, who, as she learned from Jan Faber, had once wanted to search the cave for children and had died in an accident shortly afterward. Neither her father nor her aunt will discuss the matter. Johanna is convinced they are lying to her. The archaeologist’s daughter allows Johanna to look through her father’s papers. Johanna finds a drawing and becomes convinced that the missing people are in Spiegelberg Cave. The rescue team does not believe her, since that cave is on the opposite side of the mountain. Johanna sets off alone. She does not know that her father has meanwhile told the rescue workers that they would be wise to believe her: there is a passage inside the mountain connecting the two caves. As Johanna ventures farther into the cave, she finds many corpses; they appear to be young soldiers. She takes the rusted identity tag from one of them. Then she hears the voices of the trapped people and goes to get help. As soon as she leaves the cave, she meets Jan and her aunt at the entrance. Charlotte gives her an injection, saying she has to protect her. Johanna’s father then intervenes, and the girls are rescued from the cave, although David remains missing. Her father tells Johanna that he was the one who betrayed his older brother during the Hitler era. His brother, still very young, had been conscripted in the final days of the war and was hiding with his comrades in Spiegelberg Cave—in other words, he had deserted. After the betrayal, all the young men were summarily executed, and Georg Bischoff was forced to press the button that sealed the cave with an explosion. Rudmann had discovered Georg’s involvement and put pressure on him to obtain permission to excavate the cave. When Rudmann would not let the matter drop, Charlotte killed him to protect the family secret. Not long afterward, Georg Bischoff shoots himself. When Jan asks Johanna when she is leaving, she says she is waiting until David comes back. Jan points out that the search for him has been called off, but Johanna simply replies that she has not given up. In the final shot, David is seen on the ground above Spiegelberg Cave. Taking a deep breath, he sits down on a rocky ledge. He is holding a flute in his hand.