Ein Mord mit Aussicht (2015)

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"Ein Mord mit Aussicht" is a German small screen movie that aired first around the Christmas days of 2015 and this one is closely connected to the television show with almost the same name. Just add an "Ein". Many actors reprised their roles to give the series some kind of closure. The most known is probably Bjarne Mädel from Stromberg and the comedic core of this film certainly helps him in giving perhaps the best performance from the cast. Director Schomburh and writer Hessler are both relatively prolific, but not too much. This film here runs for slightly under 1.5 hours and depicts the investigation of the murder of a high-profile police official. The fact that in the end a nymphomaniac is found guilty says it all really. This is at no point a film that takes itself seriously from the crime genre perspective. It is really all about the comedy. And that's a good thing because it makes it easy to look past the moments when the film becomes too absurd and over-the-top in terms of the case it depicts. Of course not all of the comedy is working, but enough is to turn the overall outcome into a success. I must admit I never watched the show that this film follows, but this movie here got me a bit curious about said show. Just a bit though because it is never a tense or gritty or really dramatic movie. It is a decent comedy that has a touch of these many recent German comedies focusing on certain regions in Germany and the people's and police officers' quirks. From that perspective, it is a well-handled project and there is certainly more positive than negative in here. I think it is worth checking out and the fact that even big German film buffs will probably recognize nobody except Mädel and von Bülow, maybe Matschke too, is not a problem at all. It's really not an actors movie at all, even if the cast adds its share as well to how well these almost 90 minutes turned out in the end. Go see it.