Tod auf der Insel (2015)

Georg Bohn travels with his wife and daughter to the North Sea island of Föhr for their summer vacation. The woman who runs the island hotel immediately notices that the couple’s relationship is very strained. Her daughter, Katharina Venner, who also lives on the island, quickly forms a connection and a kind of closeness with Annika Bohn. Both women seem somewhat sad, and Katharina can relate to Annika because her own marriage is also in deep crisis. Her husband, Nils, left her recently, and her nearly grown son has moved in with a friend because he could no longer bear the family situation. Katharina finds work the best distraction, so although she is supposed to be off, she takes an extra shift aboard the rescue boat, which is going to search for a missing vacationer. It is Annika who has disappeared, and her body is now pulled from the sea. It quickly becomes clear that she was murdered. Finn Hartung is therefore sent to the island by the responsible police station in Husum to take over the case. He soon discovers that there had been tensions between the Bohns, but also that Annika was very sociable. The previous evening, which she had spent with her husband at the island pub, she had flirted with many men, including Nils Venner, who was the last to leave the pub, quite drunk. There are indications that Nils had been having a good time with Annika on the beach two hours before her death. He himself can no longer remember anything. When the police question Nils as their prime suspect, Katharina becomes increasingly pensive, because she cannot imagine that the man she has spent the last few years with could be a murderer. Convinced of his innocence, she begins investigating on her own. She suspects Annika’s husband, whom she had found rather brusque and jealous. But Georg Bohn now leaves the island and returns to Hamburg with his daughter. Katharina follows him, hoping he might provide a lead toward solving the case. She is right: deeply grief-stricken, Georg Bohn has only now realized what he has lost in his wife, whom he so often treated badly. He tells Katharina about Annika. As an infant, she had been left anonymously on the steps of a Catholic children’s home. Just a few months ago, she had gone back there. He learned this from a nun at the funeral who had taken especially good care of Annika back then. She had even kept the carrier bag in which Annika was found. It bears the word “Föhr,” which was why Annika chose to vacation there. She hoped she might find the person who had left her there. Katharina asks the commissioner in Husum whether he will look into this story, but Hartung shows little interest. He says Bohn had already told him about it, but his inquiries in that direction had come to nothing. Back on Föhr, Katharina asks her mother whether she remembers anyone from the island leaving a child in Hamburg. Instead of answering directly, her mother suddenly confesses that her husband is not Katharina’s father: she had had a brief affair with his best friend, Karl Hansen. A short time later, she became pregnant again, but the baby supposedly died at birth. Katharina suspects this isn’t true and questions her biological father. Karl explains that Hauke Petersen did not want the child. An operation for a hernia had revealed that Hauke was infertile, so Hauke had brought the baby to Karl and lied to his wife. It came as such a surprise to Karl that he could think of nothing else to do but give the baby away. When Annika came into his pub with her family, he immediately knew who she was, because their daughter had the same little plush giraffe as the one he had put in the bag back then. He had also spoken about it with Hauke, who wanted nothing to do with the whole matter. Katharina suspects that her father, Hauke, must have had something to do with Annika’s disappearance, because she knows he was on the beach on the night she died. She informs Commissioner Hartung and asks him to come to the island. He questions Katharina’s father about what happened, and the man admits that he got into an argument with Annika after telling her he knew who she was. She fell onto a rock, and because he thought no one would believe him, he took her into the sea. Through these dramatic events, Katharina and Nils find their way back to each other, and their son comes home as well. The events have shown them all how fragile life is.