Sebastian Fitzeks Der Heimweg (2024)

Jules Tanneberg volunteers for the companion phone service, which helps women who are walking home alone in the evening or at night and want to talk to someone. On the evening of December 6, he speaks with Klara Vernet. She is breathing heavily but at first does not want to say why. However, drawing on his experience as a former emergency-call operator, Jules realizes that she is in trouble. She explains that the Calendar Killer is after her. This serial killer tells his victims, in bloody writing, when they will die. When Klara woke up in a basement, she saw the message: “6.12. Him or you †.” So either she is to be killed, or she is to kill her husband, Martin. Earlier that evening, on their wedding anniversary, Klara had gone to an expensive restaurant with her husband, who works as a state secretary. She was a lawyer herself, but now looks after their six-year-old daughter, Amelie, and has psychological problems. After dinner, Martin took her to a BDSM club for a violent-play session, where she was brutally abused. To escape what awaits her, she now tries to take her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in the car, after leaving a final message for Vigo, the babysitter, about their daughter. Jules realizes what she is doing over the phone, but she ends the call. Jules receives a call from his father, who works as an investigator. His father offers to help. The nausea that comes on makes Klara abandon her suicide attempt, and she calls Jules again. They talk about domestic violence, and then Klara reveals that she was treated at the Bergerhof clinic for a dissociative disorder. Jules knows the clinic because his wife was also a patient there. She killed herself in the bathtub as the house caught fire because of their son’s carelessness. Jules learned about it through an emergency call. At the vacation house she has gone to, Klara says she suspects her husband of being a murderer. Then she sees someone approaching the house and ends the call again. She manages to flee into the woods before it turns out that the man is Jules’s father. Klara collapses in the woods. A man in a Saint Nicholas costume, who introduces himself as Hendrik, gives her a ride in his car. During the drive, Klara calls Jules again and sings a lullaby for his sick daughter, Fabienne. When Hendrik drives into town and Klara asks him for a cigarette, she sees a Taser in the car. She panics, but at that moment Martin appears and knocks Hendrik unconscious. Martin drives Klara home and again makes aggressive accusations against her. Meanwhile, Jules remains on edge; earlier, he had scattered glass shards behind the front door. He is attacked by a young man, who then threatens to fall from the ledge. In the garage, however, Klara overpowers Martin with the Taser she took with her and locks him in the car. She then enters the house, from where Jules has been on the phone the whole time, and sees him sitting by Amelie’s bed. He reveals that he is the Calendar Killer and explains that he has been monitoring her house with cameras. A few minutes before midnight, Martin comes into the house and Jules ties him up. Jules urges Klara to kill her husband. But instead of stabbing Martin in the neck, she stabs Jules in the foot. Jules’s father has followed Klara to the house and finds Vigo’s body outside. He gets inside just in time as Jules is about to kill Klara, and shoots his son. He says he recognized his son’s handwriting in the messages. A few days later, Martin plans to honor brave people at a reception at City Hall. But at that moment, a voice message appears on the guests’ phones. Klara secretly recorded it to expose her husband. Martin is arrested by the police. Klara now enjoys life with Amelie.