Neben der Spur - Dein Wille geschehe (2017)

Hamburg psychiatrist Dr. Johannes Jessen is asked by the police to help stop a woman from jumping off a bridge. Despite all his efforts, Carina Winter jumps to her death. Jessen is then tormented by self-doubt and nightmares, because the successful psychiatrist is not used to failing. His ambition drives him to find out what prompted the woman to do it. Jenny Winter, her underage daughter, is convinced that her mother would never kill herself, and Carina Winter’s business partner also finds her behavior strange. Jessen tells Inspector Ruiz that something about the case cannot be right, but initially he sees no criminal offense. That changes when the forensic technician investigates and discovers that Winter was in phone contact with a caller shortly before and even during her jump. However, the caller cannot be identified because an unregistered prepaid card was used. A few days later, another woman dies by an equally inexplicable suicide. She, too, had been in phone contact with someone, leading Jessen to suspect that they are dealing with a “soul breaker” who drives women to suicide. After another call is made using the prepaid phone they have traced, Patrick Friesner becomes a focus of the investigation. Jessen realizes that the former soldier is still traumatized by his wartime experiences. In Jessen’s view, Friesner lacks what it takes to manipulate people as the caller did, and his claim that he merely found the phone seems plausible. The search for the perpetrator is open again, and Inspector Ruiz hopes for clues from Ellen Schwarz, a former classmate of the victims, who had recently invited them to a class reunion but then failed to show up herself. When they ask her parents, they say that their daughter supposedly drowned three months earlier in a ferry accident off Greece, along with her six-year-old daughter. Their search for Ellen’s husband and the child’s father leads to Gedeon Tauber, who had been barred from contacting his wife and daughter by a restraining order. But before Ruiz and Jessen can follow that lead, an emergency call comes in. Mirja Becker, another former classmate of Ellen Schwarz, is said to be trying to provoke a “suicide by cop,” but this time they manage to save the potential victim. When Ruiz and Jessen are finally able to search for Gedeon Tauber, they get a big surprise: he had already been at the station, where he managed to deceive them by posing as his former comrade Patrick Friesner. Jessen discovers that Ellen Schwarz and her daughter are still alive, and that her parents made up the story about the accident simply to protect them. Gedeon Tauber had therefore tried by every means to lure his ex-wife out of hiding so he could punish her. He had driven Ellen Schwarz’s school friends to suicide by these macabre methods. Since this had not worked so far, he enlists Jessen to further his aims, first taking Jessen’s daughter and then his wife hostage. Tauber’s careless phone calls with Jessen allow the police to determine his location. In an empty house, the special police unit finds Charlotte and Nora Jessen relatively unharmed, but Tauber has escaped. While the two women are being treated in hospital, Jessen goes home alone. To his surprise, Tauber is waiting for him there and, after a brief conversation with the psychiatrist, allows the police to arrest him without resistance. After Jessen makes a public scene out of jealousy toward his wife’s boss, and following the life-threatening events of the abduction, Nora Jessen demands that her husband move out of their shared home. Johannes Jessen complies and, in the final scene, meets privately with Ruiz, who is also single.