Entführt (2009)

The Bergmann family seems to lead a happy, carefree life. The mother, Liane, is a surgeon; the father, Frank, is an architect; and they have a daughter named Hannah, who is about 13. However, the family has been under covert surveillance for some time, and a planned kidnapping is taking shape. Several initially independent storylines introduce different people, whose connections to one another remain unclear for the time being. One morning, when Hannah is due to start school later than usual, her father takes her to his current construction project first. Since the kidnappers had planned to abduct the daughter that day, they simply take both Hannah and Frank prisoner and hold them in an old, abandoned railway station. Liane is called at work and told to go home. She immediately suspects a kidnapping and alerts the criminal police, who launch an investigation under Chief Inspector Thomas Danner. Liane’s suspicions are soon confirmed when an unusually large ransom of 22 million euros is demanded. The Bergmann family could never raise that amount. But Liane’s father, Albert Targensee, a multimillionaire industrialist, is willing to pay the ransom for his granddaughter and son-in-law without Liane even having to ask him. It becomes clear that the relationship between father and daughter is deeply strained. When Liane’s mother died 20 years ago, Albert remarried again fairly soon. Liane, who blames her father for her mother’s suicide, had completely cut off contact with him and forbidden him from seeing his granddaughter. It now emerges that Liane’s husband, who had recently been struggling in his career, had asked Albert for money without her knowledge, but Albert had only provided partial financial assistance. Frank therefore initially comes under suspicion of staging a kidnapping to extort the money he needs. Liane is outraged by these accusations, undermining her trust in Inspector Danner and making it harder for them to work together. The suspicion that the ransom demand had targeted Albert Targensee’s wealth from the outset grows stronger when he is told to deliver the money in person. Meanwhile, the situation in the kidnappers’ hideout escalates, and Frank is killed while trying to escape. As the film progresses, more and more of the Targensee family history is revealed. It leads, among other places, to New York, where parts of the film are also set. Albert Targensee grew up there after being taken in as a foster son by the Brand family, a family of entrepreneurs. As a young man, he induced the young Maximilian Kessler—now an authorized signatory at the pharmaceutical company and manager of Targensee’s stud farm—to give false testimony as a witness to a fatal car accident involving the Brands. In doing so, he drove his wealthy foster parents to suicide, then founded his own company using parts of the Brand business. Their biological son, Albert Brand, is now taking revenge on him, more than 50 years later, by instigating the kidnapping in an effort to ruin Albert Targensee financially and drive him to his death. Targensee’s second daughter, Vera, who has built a career in her father’s company, has established important contacts in New York in recent years. These eventually lead to a business deal that is also closely connected to the kidnapping. Through the contract, Albert Brand manages to foist subsidiary companies in the pharmaceutical sector onto Targensee’s daughter, saddling them with substantial compensation claims that may spell the ruin of the Targensee empire. It also emerges that Liane’s mother, Dorothea, is not dead at all. A former terrorist, she was forced by Targensee to confess and go into hiding abroad. Dorothea is also involved in the kidnapping, but from North Africa she is unable to control how it unfolds in any decisive way. In the end, the child is released, and the connections and motives of everyone involved are revealed. Albert Brand is arrested, and Maximilian Kessler, an accomplice in the kidnapping, takes his own life at the end. The consequences of the financial and human losses remain unresolved.