Ein Mord mit Aussicht (2015)

In a nightmare sequence, the head of the Hengasch police station, Sophie Haas, relives how Cologne senior police official Hans-Peter Jogereit repeatedly rejects her application to join the Cologne police for no reason, hiring Heike Schäffer instead, the wife of his subordinate Dietmar Schäffer. In reality, the station is celebrating Schäffer’s birthday that morning when a report comes in that a house in neighboring Hammelforst has been broken into. The owner of the vacation home is Jogereit. As Haas explains to her colleague Bärbel Schmied on the way there, he was involved in a bribery scandal some time ago and had also rejected her application in real life. While taking stock at the crime scene, Haas discovers that Jogereit has not stored a loaded pistol in his home in accordance with the law, and files a complaint against him. Late that evening, Sophie Haas gets a call from Jogereit. He urgently asks her to come to his vacation home because he needs to discuss a confidential police matter with her. She leaves Schäffer’s boisterous birthday party at the Aubach Inn. That same night, the head of the police station responsible for Hammelforst, Inspector Sandra Holm, is called to the crime scene. There she finds the armed Hengasch police trio—Haas, Schäffer, and Schmied—dressed in civilian clothes. Jogereit is lying dead on the floor. When Schäffer’s wife also turns up at the scene, Holm arrests everyone present. During questioning at the ultramodern Hammelforst police station, the inspector is presented with a colorful mix of imagined and actual versions of the day’s events, as each person questioned tries to put themselves in the best possible light and do as little harm as possible to the others. As a result, everyone comes across as unconvincing: Sophie Haas, with her attempts to speak “from one policewoman to another”; Dietmar Schäffer, because he is heavily intoxicated; Bärbel Schmied, because of hormone-induced mood swings; and Heike Schäffer, because her accounts of the people around her are clearly subjective. During the questioning, the viewer is repeatedly shown moments that have already passed, staged slightly differently, as though seen through the protagonists’ eyes. At this point, Hengasch mayor Jan Schulte arrives at the station to secure the release of his girlfriend, Sophie Haas. During an argument with the Hammelforst inspector, he provides the crucial clues that enable Haas and Holm to solve the case together. The culprit is Mara, Jogereit’s young girlfriend, who, together with the young gardener, got hold of the bribe money Jogereit had kept in the panic room of his weekend house.