The newest Rostock instalment of the German crime series "Polizeiruf" centred on the murder of an Eastern European woman working as a prostitute. A barcode was tattooed on the corpse's body alongside the figure "2000 Euro" — described by one of the investigating officers as a pimp's stamp. Detectives Katrin König (Anneke Kim Sarnau) and Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann) led the case.
Alongside the investigation, the two commissioners again confronted their own private difficulties, described as one woman's longing for her father and the other's struggle over her daughter. At the same time the episode examined exploitation in the field of forced sex work, tracing dependency relationships in close detail and consistently mapping the mechanisms of dehumanisation — in which, the review argues, the clients also have a share when they enter certain areas of the red-light milieu. In one unsettling sequence, men were asked why they go to prostitutes; one replied that even in a perfect world there would always be prostitutes, because humans descended from animals.
In its review, the publication said the way the fates of young Eastern European sex workers are interwoven with the complex biographies of the investigators is stirring. Screenwriter Florian Oeller had already written the second-to-last Rostock episode, and the review described his new crime film, directed by Franziska Schlotterer, as extremely hard in its illumination of the red-light scene while never speculatively linking the violence there to the officers' tragic personal histories. The review identified one remaining problem: the impeccably connected narrative threads can only be fully understood by viewers who have seen and can remember all the episodes of recent years — a feast for Rostock devotees and a challenge for everyone else. It awarded the film 8 out of 10 points.
The murder case was solved by the end of the episode, but the entanglements within the police milieu were not completely resolved. According to the article, they are likely to play a role in the next episode, which was again written by Oeller. That already-filmed instalment is titled "Schwarzer Sommer" and deals with an attack planned by a left-wing group on a multi-billionaire.
Sources: Der Spiegel.