The trigger-happy HR Hessen Western “Today Kainer dies here” on ARD leaves you feeling uncomfortable. The TV review.
Alcoholism, corruption, illness, bankruptcy, boredom – no matter how or why, the men in this story are drawing to a close. While the locations in the Wetterau and the Odenwald shine lively in late summer green and yellow, a bunch of broken men plunges into either murder or suicide.
Neo-Nazis armed to the teeth in the Hessian province. Incapable to corrupt police officers with a trunk full of guns. The HR film “Today Kainer dies here” in the ARD program could be meant as a bitter inventory in a federal state where right-wing terror and police scandals continue to shock. It is precisely these grievances that make the television film a hard-to-bear experience, because it comes across as a relaxed, fluffy Hessen western, and yet it distributes head-shots as hard as possible.
Maria-Anna Westholzer celebrates her feature film debut with “Today, Kainer dies here” on ARD
Those responsible around the director and feature film debutante Maria-Anna Westholzer, who also wrote the script together with Michael Proehl, tell, according to the press release, “in an exciting and bizarre way about the last days of a man who is looking for the loneliness to die, but before that must face the madness of life ”.
“Today Kainer dies here”
First broadcast: Wednesday, April 21, 2021, 8.15 p.m. on ARD. Preview in the media library.
Screenwriter Proehl previously made a name for himself with work for the crime scene, among other things. Most memorable was the episode “Born in pain” from Wiesbaden from 2014, which won the Grimme Prize and for which he provided the template. This also incited a horde of trigger-happy gangsters on the neck of the investigator played by Ulrich Tukur with Western elements. Back then, the audience and the press were fascinated by a different quota for a change: the record-breaking “body count” for a crime scene, the number of corpses in the hail of bullets, which after 90 minutes was between 47 and 51, depending on the count.
In the ARD feature film “Today Kainer dies here”, Martin Wuttke plays antihero Ulrich Kainer
The new film focuses on an antihero: Ulrich Kainer, played by Martin Wuttke, was once a contract killer and receives his death sentence at the beginning of the film after an MRI scan. For the last few days from Frankfurt he ends up in a Hessian town with the thigh knocker’s name Oberöhde. The weapon with the final bullet is his only baggage.
But there a conflict between the spirited host of an Italian restaurant and the local money vulture comes to a head – there is only one place in the village. In the Clint Eastwood tradition, the mysterious stranger Kainer quickly becomes a welcome fire accelerator.
With a stubbly beard and bald head, as well as his monosyllabic style, which in good moments reminds of characters from the US series “Breaking Bad”, Wuttkes Kainer is suitable as a threatening projection surface. Although he is only looking for peace and quiet in the bed and breakfast room on the farm of the single farmer Marie (Britta Hammelstein), everyone soon recognizes him as a mafia killer ordered from Sicily.
“Today Kainer dies here” (ARD): Bloodbath leaves a bad feeling
So while the sun is sinking relentlessly and the glances accompanied by the crackling of cigarettes are getting grimmer, the film gathers scene after scene a new horde of violent thugs for the showdown on the farm.
But what already explores the limits of taste in the bloodbath films by Quentin Tarantino, which apparently serve as a model, leaves a bad feeling here. While some were still fascinated by counting corpses in 2014, in 2021 the images and messages of the past months and years will not get out of your head. The aestheticization and the incidental nature of violence therefore does not appear bizarre or ludicrous, but – albeit involuntarily – like a terrifying caricature of reality. (Jakob Maurer)
