Mord in den Dünen (2013)

Street worker Lisa Hirth works with girls living on the streets of Berlin. One day, Pia—whom Lisa had recently managed to find a vocational training placement for—disappears without a trace. Lisa finds a strange message on her voicemail, sent from Pia’s phone. It is the Jackson Five’s 1970s hit “I’ll Be There,” played backwards—a song Lisa believes Pia could not possibly know. Suspecting a kidnapping, Lisa contacts police officer Karla Hünsgen, who initially does not believe her. Lisa nevertheless discovers that Pia’s phone was tracked to the Baltic Sea peninsula of Darß. On impulse, she takes leave and drives to Born a. Darß, where she runs into Enno, a childhood friend who is now a police officer on the island and recently arranged to be transferred there. Station chief Erichsen is anything but pleased at the idea that the quiet island could be the scene of a crime. Enno, however, joins Lisa in searching for Pia, and eventually they find a girl’s body in the beach dunes, dismembered, wrapped in plastic bags, and buried there. Police psychologist Dominik Hofer arrives on the island with an investigative team from the State Criminal Police Office. An examination shows that the body has been there for at least a year, so it cannot be Pia. In Hofer’s view, Lisa is the trigger for the events. It emerges that 22 years earlier, when Lisa was a teenager, she spent a vacation on Darß with her parents. She partied wildly with other teenagers, including Enno, drinking alcohol and taking other drugs, and she and Enno grew close. But when the vacation ended, they lost touch. Eventually, Enno and Lisa find the bodies of five more girls, buried in the beach dunes just like the first body, dismembered and wrapped in plastic. Items found with them allow the girls to be identified to varying degrees, and it becomes clear that they too were street children whom Lisa had worked with in Berlin over the past few years, before they disappeared under unclear circumstances. Further clues suggest that the killer is playing some kind of game with Lisa. She recalls being threatened in Berlin by a Doberman wearing the same scarf as one of the girls. The words TUA CULPA—“It’s your fault”—are carved into a bench by the beach, not far from where the bodies were found. The same phrase appears the next morning on the dirty rear window of her car. Then Lisa’s friend, who is looking after her apartment, finds a freshly torn-out fingernail in Lisa’s aquarium, possibly belonging to Pia. Suspicion falls on Enno, whose apartment contains photos of Lisa that he secretly took in Berlin recently. He admits that he has never been able to forget Lisa, but lacked the courage to tell her how he felt. Hofer uses a trick to establish that Enno cannot be the killer. He urges Lisa to revisit her memories of that vacation. She remembers that there were seven of them. Six paired off into three couples for vacation romances, and they called the remaining seventh person, a shy boy named Felix, “the third wheel.” One evening, carried away by their high spirits, they took over a fishing boat and headed out to sea. When a fire suddenly broke out, they had to escape by jumping overboard. Felix, who apparently could not swim, was dragged overboard by Lisa, who then saved him from drowning. Hofer now understands what happened: the boy had planned to die and set the boat on fire, but Lisa stopped him from dying. As a result, he does not consider himself responsible for the murders he committed; instead, he projects the blame onto Lisa. All his little clues were signals that he wanted to be found and freed at last. The psychologist and Lisa contact Felix’s sister, who also disappeared without a trace for two days several years ago. They suspect that Felix had kidnapped her too, but she remains silent. Finally, the Doberman appears again outside Lisa’s hotel room. She follows it to a residential container set apart from the campsite. She enters and is caught by surprise by Felix, who incapacitates her with a Taser and takes her to his boat, where Pia is also being held. The police are already on his trail, but arrive at the container too late. When Lisa wakes, they are out at sea, and she is tied up on the boat’s deck. Felix pours gasoline over it, sets it alight, and drops into the water. Lisa frees herself and rescues Pia. They jump into the water together and are found shortly afterward by a helicopter, while Felix sinks into the depths and drowns. At the end of the film, Lisa announces that she is going to leave Berlin. As she says goodbye to Enno, she gives him one of the photos from that vacation, with her phone number written on the back.