Schneewittchen muss sterben (2013)

After serving a seven-year sentence, Tobias Sartorius is released from prison and takes the bus back to his home village of Altenhain, where people greet him with distrust and suspicion. Eight years earlier, after a performance of the fairy tale Snow White, Tobias was supposedly responsible for killing the lead actress, Stefanie Schneeberger, and hiding her body. When Gregor Lauterbach, the director of the play at the time, visits Tobias, the two men get into an argument. The next morning, Lauterbach’s body is found hanging from a tree in the woods. Detectives Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff are called in to determine whether it was suicide or whether someone else was involved. News of the body soon spreads through the village, and at first people think Stefanie’s body has finally been found. Once again, Tobias is the first to be suspected of having something to do with Lauterbach’s death. The investigative duo tries to question as many people as possible, including about the crime committed eight years earlier. Inevitably, they are given different accounts of what is said to have happened on that fateful evening. Tobias claims that Gregor made an indecent advance toward Stefanie and struck her when she rejected him. She sustained a bloody injury, and her blood got on Tobias’s shirt when he tried to comfort her. Afterwards, he drank too much that evening and woke up the next morning with no memory of what had happened, leaving part of the night a blank. Lars Terlinden, who was Tobias’s friend at the time, gives a different account. He says Stefanie had been harassed by Tobias for a long time, including that evening. Tobias chased after the young woman, and his pent-up frustration apparently turned violent. Meanwhile, two women are interested in Tobias, who is once again under suspicion: his ex-girlfriend Nadja Bredow, an ambitious actress who is determined to get him back and imagines a future together in Frankfurt am Main, where she now lives; and Amelie Fröhlich, who has only recently arrived in the village, has just learned about the crime from eight years ago, and seeks to be close to Tobias. Tobias, however, is no longer interested in Nadja. Amelie wants to help Tobias and repeatedly tries to provoke the village community. She concludes that he did not harm Stefanie back then, and decides to get to the bottom of the matter herself. Disguised as “Snow White,” she attends a church service and watches the villagers’ reactions. Thies, Lars Terlinden’s intellectually disabled twin brother, is so startled by her appearance that he runs off into the woods. Amelie finds him there but cannot calm him down. After he runs away again, she is attacked and abducted. A police search team, along with von Bodenstein and Kirchhoff and their dog, which has been trained as a tracker, begin searching for Amelie. Eventually, the dog leads the detectives to the Terlindens’ park-like estate. There, where Thies has made himself a garden, they come across a vault and find Stefanie’s mummified body in a coffin. The scene is arranged to resemble “Snow White,” and Thies’s open fairy-tale book lies beside the coffin. Oliver von Bodenstein brings in psychologist Dr. Horstmann to question Thies, hoping to find out what really happened on the night of the murder. Among Thies’s belongings, they find a hand-drawn picture depicting Lars raping Stefanie. An autopsy of Stefanie’s body indeed reveals traces of Lars’s semen, strengthening the suspicion against him. It turns out, however, that Lars was not the one who killed Stefanie; it was his mother, Christine Terlinden. She had caught her son raping Stefanie and tried to persuade the girl to keep the incident secret. But her attempt to cover it up had no effect on the girl, who was in an extreme state and firmly determined to report Lars, and so she had to die. Christine Terlinden confesses and reveals where she is holding Amelie, allowing Amelie to be freed. It is also established that Gregor Lauterbach hanged himself. Thies had found him in the woods and taken away the stool he had stood on. The depressed man had been blackmailed by Nadja Bredow with photos showing that he and Stefanie had been more than teacher and student.