Düstersee (2023)

Hildegard Vernau asks her son to find out why her friend, Ingeborg Huth, has stopped getting in touch. She suspects an affair and wants to know the truth. Lawyer Joachim Vernau takes the case and keeps his target under surveillance. He follows her to Düstersee, where she really does meet a man and get into his car. The man is the town’s mayor. Apparently, Ingeborg Huth is planning to settle there in her old age. Vernau considers his assignment complete, but the next morning he happens to witness the aftermath of a murder when investor Christian Steinhoff is found dead. Steinhoff had wanted to renovate an old villa, along with the local lake, and had solicited co-investors the previous evening. His plan was controversial in town, especially since he had filed a petition to expropriate the lakeside properties he needed for the project, so he must have had several enemies. Steinhoff’s wife does not trust the local police and hires Vernau to take over the case. He accepts, and immediately becomes embroiled in another murder: Sanja Huth, who owns one of the valuable lakeside properties Steinhoff had wanted to acquire. Ten years earlier, he had also bought the old villa at an extremely low price after a young man died there in a fire. Mayor Kurt Wössner is certain that Steinhoff himself was behind it, so he could take over the property. The case gradually begins to make sense to Vernau: apparently, Sanja Huth had called on her aunt Ingeborg for help so that she would not lose her house to Steinhoff without a fight. As part of her campaign, Sanja had also “dug up” the old fire and the death of Chris Helmholtz, which could have endangered not only Steinhoff but also a possible accomplice. Steinhoff’s widow, however, insists that her husband had loved the villa since childhood and had definitely had nothing to do with the arson. Questioning the girl who survived the fire back then confirms this suspicion. Vernau is now convinced that Steinhoff’s murder was a revenge plot by Chris Helmholtz’s parents. But he is mistaken again: as it now appears, Steinhoff’s stepdaughter is behind everything. She had been in love with Chris Helmholtz, and when her stepfather objected to their relationship, he forced her to have an abortion after she became pregnant by Helmholtz. Years later, she has now taken revenge on him. She was also the one who set the house on fire out of jealousy, and she has never got over the fact that she thereby killed the man she loved; Sanja Huth had discovered this. Now that she sees herself exposed, she sets fire to the villa again, killing herself and her mother as well.