Anara van Veeren (Marlene Tanczik) dies in a car accident. The brakes don’t work, she speeds through the middle of a construction site, and the airbags fail. Now she is in an artificial coma, the doctor explains to her husband Max (Klaus Steinbacher). But there is good news: the child is doing well. Wait, the child? Max doesn’t know that Anara is pregnant. And not about many other things either, for example the fact that his beloved wife apparently kept a second home. They have it so pretty in their completely sterile glass palace with a glass terrace. Yes, in this film Frankfurt looks like every provincial noodle imagines the city to look, and the residents only think about the next deal all day long, that’s how we are here.
The accident and the double life are inconvenient because Max works as – according to his self-assessment – “the young aspiring wolf” at a company that sells data surveillance programs. The obviously sinisterly named “Project Phoenix” is about to be sold to a sheikh who wants to use it to spy on his subjects. We’re not dealing with the good guys here, and that doesn’t make it easy to feel sympathy for the young wolf Max. Or for anyone at all.
In contrast to his last roles as Franz Beckenbauer in “The Emperor” and as a brewery heir in “Oktoberfest 1900”, the main actor Klaus Steinbacher was unfortunately forced to speak standard German. This only works so well, but in most German films language doesn’t matter. Not just how something is said, but also what is said. For example, older colleague Patrick Reitwald (Marcus Mittermeier) says to the sheikh: “Frankfurt has developed enormously in terms of cuisine in recent years. That’s why it would be a great honor and pleasure for us to be able to invite you and your followers to an extraordinary sensory experience.” The remaining dialogues sound as if they were not eavesdropping on life, but on the previous evening’s program.
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The extraordinary sensory experience for the sheikh then takes place in a club that can be reached through various dark backyards and which serves a secondary function as a sinful techno barn. Just the right atmosphere for a high-ranking Muslim customer. Unfortunately, just as the oysters land on the table, something completely new in Frankfurt, which has so far been underdeveloped in culinary terms, Max goes crazy. Is the waiter a conspirator? Is colleague Patrick the father of the unborn child? Hasn’t his wife Anara, an ambitious but not yet fully financed gallery owner, always flirted with him? Does Saskia want to fuck Max? Should everyone be poisoned? Max no longer knows where his head is. Because he’s always been a bit on the clumsier side socially, he does what he can: he screams and pukes into the champagne bucket. His colleague Saskia (Felicitas Woll) discreetly removes him from the table and the deal with Dubai takes place without him.
In order to find out what really happened, Max has to drug the conspirator waiter, kidnap him and tie him to a chair in Anara’s second apartment. How exactly he moved the lifeless body across half the city is not explained, but we would have been interested in it somehow. The solution that the waiter then tells us is so stupid that it’s not really worth all the effort beforehand. In the end, you saw 89 minutes of contemporary offices, contemporary living spaces, contemporary entertainment environments and not a single normal person. There are said to be quite a few of them in Frankfurt. Fresh oysters, as much service as there is still housed here, have been available in the small market hall in a completely unpretentious manner and have been for decades. We can recommend that, “Blindspot” not so much.
Blindspot runs this Monday at 8:15 p.m. on ZDF.