Not without my son
A sculptor as a supermom, a son on the wrong track, the gaming scene and its codes, seasoned with the fall of the Berlin Wall, sperm donation and red wine. It's a small Christmas miracle that Brix and Janneke remain so deeply relaxed during the Frankfurt "loss of control".
What happens?
Cara Mauersberger (Viktoria Schreiber) lies stabbed to death in her apartment. The ambitious gamer had only recently moved to Frankfurt from Saxony and had made a name for herself as a dedicated commentator on a streaming platform under the pseudonym Chipmunk. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend Lucas (Béla Gábor Lenz) is sitting in his room with nervous twitches, his hands covered in blood and a blood-soaked T-shirt in front of him - an obvious case for detectives Anna Janneke (Margarita Broich) and Paul Brix (Wolfram Koch)?
Not at all - there is Lucas' mother Annette Baer (Jeanette Hain), a sculptor whose diffuse aura attracts the good Brix. She became pregnant through a sperm donor and made a conscious decision to raise her son without a partner. There is Leon Hamann (Franz Pätzold), the property management employee who discovered Cara's body, a leisure-time revolutionary frustrated by social developments in the years since reunification. And a gamer called CancelChipmunk, who attacked Cara's ambitions with an agenda of his own. Things become increasingly complicated when there is another murder. Good thing Fanny (Zazie de Paris) serves an exquisite red in her bar.
What is it really about?
Ideally, the audience should answer this question for themselves. In order not to make this too obvious at first, a number of supposed clues are laid out, as is so often the case, but it soon becomes clear who, in addition to the plaster comrades, is all too keen to model a person of flesh and blood according to their own ideas.
Zapping away moment?
Those who are not put off by meaningful platitudes such as "Being a mother is a strange thing, isn't it?" will probably stick with it. The roast goose and gingerbread hearts on the evening of Boxing Day will probably do the rest. Although the alternative program with the Christmas special of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", "Top Gun: Maverick", "Aquaman" and "Actually... Love" is already a pretty attractive line-up.
Wow factor?
The soundtrack by Bertram Denzel and Max Knoth, played by the Symphonie-Orchester des Hessischen Rundfunks, is great and lends the action a subliminally menacing note. The sculptures shown in the film are by Frankfurt artist Birgit Brinkmann, and the mysterious homunculus eye-catchers were created especially for the film in collaboration with director Elke Hauck and production designer Manfred Döring.
How was it?
3 out of 10 points - a painstakingly assembled, overloaded mixture in which tension falls by the wayside
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In the crime thriller "Not without my son", the detective duo Anna Janneke and Paul Brix investigate a gruesome murder at a crime scene, which turns out to be the apartment of a popular gamer known as Chipmunk. Interestingly, the main suspect is none other than the victim's ex-boyfriend, but his mother, a renowned sculptor named Annette Baer, catches the attention of Paul Brix, leading to an unexpected twist in the ARD movie.
Source: www.ntv.de
