Jeanny - Das 5. Mädchen (2022)

For years, girls aged 18 to 20 have been disappearing at increasingly shorter intervals in the Lower Austrian town of Mödling, near Vienna. The police, including investigators Degner and Szabó, make little progress, so the public accuses them of incompetence and forms a citizens’ initiative to protect young people. Among its members are Kristina and Mark Eichhorn, whose daughter Carla is one of the missing girls. Amid this climate, 19-year-old student Jeanny, the daughter of an indebted single mother, meets the charming and mysterious tax consultant Johannes Bachmann. He sees Jeanny as more than just an innocent girl and gives her recognition and support, after she lost her father to cancer at a young age. Among other things, he helps her pass her mathematics school-leaving exam and boosts her self-confidence. The two begin an affair, which they keep secret. When Jeanny discovers that he has been secretly photographing and spying on her, her suspicions grow, since her best friend Luzia is the sister of the missing Carla Eichhorn. One day, Bachmann invites Jeanny to his house in the woods near Kalksburg. In its cellar, Jeanny discovers a skeleton. It is the remains of Bachmann’s sister Ellen, who was murdered in 2000. The artist Aurelio Varesi, who was friends with Ellen, served 20 years in prison for the murder and was recently released. He cannot remember the crime because he and Ellen were under the influence of drugs at the time. Years earlier, the Bachmanns’ parents had died in a car accident that only Johannes and Ellen survived. The two were then raised by their violent grandfather. Johannes tells the police that he never got over his sister’s death, which is why he brought her body to his home. He says he wanted to meet Jeanny because she strongly resembled his sister. He had also made Jeanny wear Ellen’s clothes. With no evidence, the police have to release Bachmann. Although Bachmann insists to Jeanny that he is innocent of Carla’s disappearance, Jeanny tells him she never wants to see him again. After finding his office ransacked and daubed with insults, Bachmann retreats to his house in the woods, where he tries to kill himself with pills. Aurelio Varesi finds him in time, however. Varesi confesses to Bachmann that he, too, had wanted to kill himself when he woke up beside Ellen’s dead body, but had lacked the courage. Varesi also regrets that he and Ellen had taken mushrooms. After the school-leaving exams, Jeanny and her mother plan to travel to France with Jeanny’s friend Luzia and Luzia’s father, whose wife has since left him. Johannes Bachmann continues to watch Jeanny and even sneaks into her bedroom at night. After the graduation celebration, Luzia disappears. Suspicion initially falls on Johannes again, but he has an alibi. At a scrapyard, the police find Luzia’s boyfriend bound and drugged in the trunk of his car, in which the couple had been attacked. The vigilante group, led by Mark Eichhorn, takes the law into its own hands in the school gym, beating Johannes and torturing him until the police intervene. In the meantime, the word “PAPI” has been found on the inside of a car window, prompting the police to examine Luzia’s father’s car. GPS records subsequently show that the car was at the scrapyard around midnight and then also in the floodplain, where Luzia’s body is later found. Mark Eichhorn is therefore arrested by the police; shortly afterward, he hangs himself in his prison cell. Johannes is taken to hospital, where Jeanny visits him. After he recovers, the two spend a night of passion together at Johannes’s house in the woods. Flashbacks reveal that Ellen and Johannes had also slept together, and that he was jealous of her relationship with Aurelio. The next morning, Jeanny goes into Ellen’s room, puts on her makeup and perfume, and wears her clothes. This stirs up Johannes’s feelings from the past, and he beats Jeanny as though he sees Ellen before him. Ellen had promised to stay with him forever, but then began an affair with Aurelio. In another flashback, the young Johannes is shown suffocating his sister with a pillow because of this. Before Jeanny succumbs to his grip, Johannes comes back to the present and lets go. He confesses that he was responsible for the disappearances of Carla, Luzia, and the other girls, stabs himself in the stomach with a letter opener, and is eventually arrested and taken to hospital. He himself had directed suspicion toward Mark Eichhorn. At the end of the film, Jeanny is seen driving away in Johannes’s car, headed for an unknown destination.