"The Visitation" (ARD): The dark side of the moon

Outstandingly good, cleverly conceived psychological thriller with Kostja Ullmann as BKA investigator who is confronted with a childhood trauma.

Frankfurt – Like the moon, everyone has a dark side that they don’t show anyone because they may not even be aware of it: Stephan Rick’s Martin Suter film adaptation of “The Dark Side of the Moon” (2016) was also about this Moritz Bleibtreu as a lawyer who experiences a fascinating and disturbing journey into his spiritual abysses. In his most recent work, too, Rick sends his main character on a journey that leads them into a shadowy world far beyond the limits of his own being.

It is one of the many quality features of Thorsten Wettcke’s outstanding script that all those involved are just passengers who have no idea where this journey is going: the hero, his girlfriend and the audience. The end of the film is a hit that bathes the entire story in a completely different light and pulls the rug from under everyone’s feet; above all, of course, to the protagonist, whose loss of balance is highlighted by corresponding camera movements. How in the end all the pieces of the puzzle fall into the right place as if by magic and one single insight answers all the questions: This is a great art of storytelling.

What “The Visitation” (ARD) is about

At first, however, nothing can be suspected of all this: The Berlin BKA police officer Ben (Kostja Ullmann) frees a kidnapped girl on his own. When he believes himself and the child are safe, the supposed colleagues turn out to be criminals who shoot the girl; Ben survived thanks to the bulletproof vest, but was badly hit by the shot at close range and, as a precaution, was put into an artificial coma.

Meanwhile, friend Marion (Kristin Suckow), a neurologist, has finally met his parents (Martin Feifel, Deborah Kaufmann), with whom Ben has had no contact for a long time. She persuades him to go to the Baltic Sea to relax, where he used to spend his holidays; the parents now live there. To his surprise, he learns that his childhood friend Timmi is not dead, as he always thought, but has been in a vegetative state for twenty years. Back then, the boy suffocated from deadly gases in the corn silo on his parents’ farm.

Marion is an expert on coma patients; she actually manages to awaken Timmi’s memories and communicate with him via MRI. However, one final block prevents him from waking up. Ben suspects that his friend has been the victim of a crime, because of course the farmer’s son knew about the danger in the silo; so he embarks on a journey into the common past. What he discovers there is so confusing that he eventually doubts his own mind.

The attraction of “Die Heimsuchung” (ARD) lies in the genre mix

Rick and Wettcke have already worked together on “Tod einer Journalistin” (2019); the RBB “police call” offered a good mix of crime fiction and political thriller. “The Visitation” is a completely different film, but here, too, the appeal lies in the genre mix, because the story changes from a thriller to a crime thriller to a psychological thriller. Wettcke keeps throwing in clues that all seem to be evidence of Ben’s increasing mental derangement.

Thanks to Rick’s captivating staging, there are rows and rows of goose bumps when, for example, Ben wanders through the gloomy corridors of the clinic and ends up in his own living room. In comparison, moments like the one when he sees Lara, who was murdered at the beginning, in the bathroom mirror at night, seem like commercial borrowings from horror films; Nevertheless, they do not fail to have an effect. Lara finally leads him to the shocking solution. The script is a feast for people with a penchant for stories that are constructed with great sophistication and that constantly pose new puzzles to their audience, including a clever anagram; the film actually makes you want to look at it again and now with different eyes.

“The Visitation” (ARD): Artful image design corresponds to the gloomy mood

Wettcke and Christoph Silber wrote some deadly serious crime comedies for “Tatort” from Münster and most recently the excellent episode “Licorice” (2019). Rick’s works have also been well worth seeing so far, from his debut “Unter Nachbarn” (2012) to “Querschläger” (2019), a “crime scene” from Hamburg with Milan Peschel as the father who turns into a criminal out of desperation.

“The Visitation” is probably his best film so far. The artistic design (Pascal Schmit) corresponds perfectly to the dark mood of the story, which need not shy away from comparison with the mystery thrillers by M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”, 1999). (Tilmann P. Gangloff)