Schmerzgrenze - Der Usedom-Krimi (2020)

Prosecutor Brunner lovingly cares for his mother Erika, who has dementia and lives in a luxurious retirement home on Usedom. He is also having an affair with Kerstin Matthies, the head of care services there. When the elderly woman dies, everything points to natural causes. But bruises on her body and an anonymous message accusing Matthies make Brunner doubt that conclusion. He discovers that the woman he thought was his girlfriend abused the elderly resident and also defrauded him financially. When Matthies disappears around the same time and is found dead shortly afterward, the respectable prosecutor himself comes under suspicion. Journalists and bloggers now besiege his apartment. He seeks refuge, of all people, with his former boss and adversary, Karin Lossow. The new detective, Rainer Witt, takes up the investigation, but Brunner and Karin also make inquiries of their own. Brunner recognizes the retirement home’s food deliveryman as Eberhard Fuhrmann, a former convict who served seven years in prison for shaking his grandchild to death. Fuhrmann is almost panicked by Brunner’s discovery, especially since Karin also keeps asking questions. Fuhrmann supports his pregnant daughter Vanessa, who has just opened a small waxing studio. In her conversations, Karin learns that Fuhrmann was not known for violence at all and that his conviction rested mainly on his confession. Vanessa, on the other hand, was known at the time for partying, drinking and drugs, and became pregnant unintentionally at the age of 18. It becomes clear that Vanessa, overwhelmed at the time, shook her own child to death and that her father covered for her. The current investigation could bring the truth to light and destroy all the family’s hopes, which is why Fuhrmann reacted so hysterically. Vanessa’s boyfriend Markus kidnaps Karin, but she soon manages to dissuade him from doing anything worse. Since he took Karin to the place where Matthies’s body was found, the pieces of the current case fall into place. He and Fuhrmann left Matthies’s body there together. She had been struck to death in a fit of anger by Heinrich Schoo, a resident of the home, when he confronted her after discovering Kerstin’s abuse of Erika Brunner. Schoo then told Fuhrmann, with whom he regularly played chess at the home, what had happened, and asked him to dispose of the body. During their chess games, Fuhrmann had also confessed his life story to Schoo. With a cleverly worded confession from Schoo, they manage to keep Vanessa out of it. The film ends with Ellen Norgaard suffering severe contractions. Karin has to drive her to Poland to give birth because the Peene Bridge is closed for maintenance work.