Hartwig Seeler - Gefährliche Erinnerung (2019)

Hartwig Seeler works as an independent private detective. One day, Felix Kepler hires him to find his adult daughter, Evelyn. She has vanished without a trace, and he fears something may have happened to her. Her worried parents seem desperate. Seeler takes the case and finds a lead in a book Evelyn bought some time ago, as well as a bank transfer to a kind of sect. He follows the trail to a Croatian island, where Evelyn may have joined the sect. Once there, he manages to find the young woman, but she seems to be in a very fragile state. Seeler poses as a “seeker” and is immediately taken under Amanda’s wing; she is the contact person for both him and Evelyn. Everyone here seems to be part of a harmonious community that has formed a cult around its guru, Aljoscha, and hopes to find healing and salvation through him. Their activities include sessions and hypnosis, which are supposed to bring the seekers’ unconscious thoughts to light. Seeler cautiously makes contact with Evelyn and also submits to the obscure faith community’s “treatment.” On the one hand, he does not want to be found out; on the other, the whole thing sounds appealing to him, since he is still struggling with his wife’s death. The possibility of finding inner peace is reason enough to give it a try. His private life and his work become entangled, and the question quickly arises: What is real, and what is mere imagination? Even when he learns about Evelyn’s problems—that her father allegedly abused her during her childhood and adolescence—and weighs this against her father’s account, which gives no indication of such abuse, he does not know what to make of it. He researches the subject online and learns that hypnosis can also create false memories when the therapist’s expectations shape the process through skillful leading questions. Seeler therefore confronts Amanda and learns that she herself was abused as a child. He manages to persuade Evelyn to talk to her father, who has since come to the island. Evelyn has probably felt suffocated by her father’s excessive love and suffers from never being the person others expect her to be. They talk things through and want to make a fresh start so that things can get better. The assignment has also been healing for Seeler, because his experiences on the island have taught him that he must accept his wife’s death and learn to live with it. She died in a car accident on a mountain road, and the circumstances remained unclear. There were no skid marks, leaving open the possibility that it was intentional. Since Seeler had never noticed any signs that she was tired of life, this troubled him so much that he began to doubt himself, quit the police force, and set out not only to find Evelyn but also to find himself.