Karl Nolden drags himself heavily to the mailbox. He hasn’t been walking well since the stroke. He obviously doesn’t have to read the letter that he puts into his wife Karin’s hand with the newspapers. “Karl, he wrote again,” she says. The older couple suspects who wrote something. It is Chris, the supposed friend of her son Sven, who disappeared without a trace 27 years ago. The fifteen-year-old boy just wanted to go over to the neighboring village. He played in the soccer club and was in the boy scouts. Sven never returned, and the village no longer exists; it was excavated for brown coal mining.
The omens for Inspector Ingo Thiel (Heino Ferch) and his team to solve the cold case are extremely bad when his former boss Gerd Dennert (Manfred Zapatka) shows up with the letter. Dennert was once involved in the case, he never let go of it, and he always kept in touch with the Noldens. That’s why they called the long-retired police officer and not the colleagues who are on duty today. Back then, they received one card after the other from half of Europe, sent by the aforementioned Chris, who always said that Sven was doing well and that he would be returning home soon. Why is this happening again now, 27 years later? Does anyone enjoy tormenting the Noldens, who have never gotten over their son’s disappearance?
The power of prejudice
Fortunately, the others in the team on the Lower Rhine are cold-blooded and let the stand-off of the two investigators drain on them. This is also recommended given the large number of leads that they have to follow, all of which lead nowhere, and the material that has accumulated on this case. It’s not just the modern methods of forensic science that help them advance, but also the distant view that Inspector Dennert didn’t have, as he now painfully realizes. He only had “his gay thing” on his mind, as Winni Karls says. Before his disappearance, Sven was last seen – allegedly – walking with another boy, said “Chris”, along a dirt path that led to a parking lot on the highway that was known as a gay area.
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“The letters from the afterlife,” which are in the Noldens’ (Alexandra von Schwerin, Karl Kranzkowski) mailbox, take us back to the world 27 years ago. Niki Stein and his ensemble tell the power of prejudice, the history of the region and its people in two storylines, the crossing points of which only become clearer from minute to minute in the second half of the film. At first it is completely unclear what the story of Julia Klemm (Franziska Wulf), who is worried about her daughter and her fear of her imprisoned father Jürgen Renk (Lazlo Kish), has to do with the matter. Until we find out why he’s in prison and that he’s about to be released from prison.
This is what Niki Stein, to whom we owe a number of outstanding “Tatort” episodes as well as most recently an exceptional venture like “Louis van Beethoven” in association with Katja Röder, who wrote down the previous cases of Inspector Thiel from Mönchengladbach, tells us in every scene and consistent in every movement, shot by Arthur W. Ahrweiler’s camera, which always knows how to find the right color and setting for the then and now of this story. When we find out who writes the “letters from the afterlife,” the Noldens find a little peace. And a former inspector trudges at dusk along a dirt road on which a boy walked 27 years ago and whose disappearance he was unable to solve.
letters from the afterlife, 8:15 p.m. on ZDF.