TV review “Tatort”: Thiel and Boerne hunt the Indiana Jones of North Rhine-Westphalia

“I don’t believe in God, I believe in you,” she tells him. She, that is the supposed widow, has just been awarded the life insurance of her supposedly dead husband, almost 4 million euros. He is the lawyer who made this possible for her. She, overjoyed and almost a little taken with him. He, moments later: dead.

The Münster “Tatort” duo Thiel and Boerne were supposed to clarify how it could come to this. And we as an audience watch them quite relaxed because in the next sequence we see that Jonas Prätorius (Christian Erdmann) is not dead at all, but is toasting the insurance fraud with his wife Doreen (Cordeliawege), lawyer Oskar Weintraub (Nils Brunkhorst) discovers the two by chance and is then pushed from the gallery by Praetorius, where he ends up on an upright spit.

Even in marriage, nothing is as it seems

The open narrative style gives Sascha Arango’s script room for some puppetry, although the slapstick character of the Münster duo repeatedly gets in the way of the more profound story about the secret main character Doreen Prätorius.

Her husband was or is a collector of cultural treasures from all over the world, but it soon turns out that he has built his existence as the Indiana Jones of North Rhine-Westphalia solely around this insurance fraud. The entire marriage, Doreen has to realize, is built solely on lies.

Her transformation from fraud accomplice to co-investigator is dramatically staged; at one point, in her desperation, she is already standing on the church tower, taking off her shoes and writing her farewell letter – only to report to the police a little later and lie remarkably transparently.

The plot is carried entirely by the falling apart Praetorius couple, while Thiel and Boerne meander along in their usual way once again. Thiel obviously has a weakness for Doreen Prätorius, while Boerne unwaveringly presents his absurdities. The farewell video of the apparently dead Praetorius is so exaggeratedly badly made that the grotesque ornithological lecture by the oddball professor is almost a dignified means of exposing it. And in the finale, when the air is literally getting thin for the two of them in the emergency bunker, Boerne first gets on the exercise bike to calm down.

It’s funny, certainly, but it doesn’t fit well with the dramatic escalation in Praetorius’ marriage. Because the actual murder has long been solved, the tension is reduced to whether Thiel and Boerne will achieve enlightenment quickly enough to stop Praetorius, who is running away. It’s not about much more than that. But a little depth is good for the usual slapstick from Münster.

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