Freies Land (2019)

In 1992, Detective Chief Inspector Patrick Stein is transferred from Hamburg to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and has to investigate a case in the small town of Löwitz, on the German-Polish border. Two sisters have disappeared there; perhaps they ran off to work at a hotel in Berlin. They were seen getting into a man’s car. Stein begins investigating with his new colleague, Markus Bach. Bach is from the former East Germany, likes to drink, and does not always stick to the rules when interrogating suspects. A little later, the bodies of the two girls are found by a river. Both were raped before their deaths and brutally tortured with knives and pliers. They do not seem to have been the first victims in the area. In recent years, young women have repeatedly disappeared around the time of the local fair, supposedly in search of a better life elsewhere. Since many people left the area in the years after reunification, no one paid much attention to it. The local police do not seem particularly interested in solving the cases, either. Stein and Bach find a handbag containing nude photographs of the girls in an old well. By keeping possible witnesses under surveillance, the two detectives discover an old hunting lodge that may be connected to the case. But some people seem not to want an investigation. The detectives’ car is shot at, and later all four of its tires are slashed. In addition, Stein receives an anonymous letter threatening his pregnant wife. The relationship between the investigators is strained, because Stein learns from a journalist that Bach was in the Stasi and interrogated and tortured regime critics in Bautzen. He is even said to have shot one of them, but was never held accountable for these acts. In a later conversation, Bach tells Stein that he knows about the accusations and that it was a colleague who did those things back then. They discover that rooms can be booked at the hunting lodge and that the nude photographs were taken there. A man named Janosch Junkers had lured the girls to Berlin and promised them work. The hunting lodge’s landlady also tells them that Junkers lives on an abandoned farm. There, the detectives find employment contracts containing clues to many more cases. When Junkers spots the detectives, he flees in his car to a sewage treatment plant. He wounds both of them, but Bach manages to stab him to death with a knife he took from a witness a few days earlier, then pushes him into the water. In the perpetrator’s car, Bach finds Nicole and frees her. As they celebrate solving the case, Stein speaks with the journalist again. The journalist says he was one of the witnesses and gives him some photographs showing Bach torturing people. The next morning, Stein drives to Hamburg to see his wife.