Brunhilde Blum owns a funeral home in a small village in the Austrian mountains. The woman is married to the policeman Mark and is the mother of two children, little Tim and the teenager Nela, and their father-in-law lives with them as well as a Syrian refugee, to whom Mark has offered a job.
As we tell you in the review of Totenfrau – The lady of the dead, Brunhilde’s seemingly peaceful life is shaken when her husband is hit by a car which flees immediately after the accident; the man then ends up losing his life shortly after in the hospital. While the investigations to identify who was driving the vehicle are groping in the dark, the protagonist decides to investigate privately with the aim of discovering who is behind the death of her husband who, day after day, she will discover was not at all random. Indeed, after having found the man’s cell phone, Brunhilde learns of a shady intrigue involving some of the biggest figures in the community and will find herself unveiling an increasingly disturbing mystery, also buried in the past, which lurks among those icy valleys.
Lady Vengeance
Adapted from Bernhard Aichner’s novel of the same name, Totenfrau – The lady of the dead lands in the catalog of Netflix how original, for six high-tension episodes that drag us into a small town in the mountains, where nothing is as it seems and literally no one can be trusted. Even the public itself is destined to find few footholds, between twists and unexpected betrayals that characterize a story full of nuances, further amplified by the revelation that comes right in the epilogue and casts unprecedented reflections on the protagonist herself. From the first seconds of the opening episode, a recurring flashback alternates with the present, which sees the character of Brunhilde lost in the open sea aboard a small yacht, looking for someone or something. And it is no coincidence that throughout the season the woman is hunting for killers who killed her husband, turning into an implacable angel of vengeance who will stop at nothing and nobody.
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Dead speaking
It also delves into the grotesque, poised between black irony and more dramatic situations, when Ours is at talk to corpses, who respond to her – to her and her alone – as if they were still alive, suggesting decisions to be made or nibbling more or less incisive clues on the way forward. And it can be understood that the story is not subtle since a man of the Church is also included among the eligible villains, with no one who can be said to be actually innocent and free from more or less serious faults. Each episode ends with a noteworthy tensive climax, in which the main character is in danger or is herself threatening the safety of others, prompting the viewer to press the play button on the remote control again to discover the further narrative evolution to come. Although I am not free from some clever tricks in managing the large number of secondary figures, Totenfrau – The lady of the dead knows how to keep the attention high throughout its four and a half hours of total duration.
The ways of violence
Raw and strong passages are brought up, with the snuff movie which become the central heart of the investigative part since everything starts, as it will soon be discovered, precisely from the kidnapping of some young immigrants, tortured and killed to shoot sex videos and murders by a circle of brutal psychopaths. And while never ending in violence as an end in itself, a couple of passages can be partially disturbing for the more impressionable audience, perhaps accustomed to much more sweetened television investigations.
Totenfrau – The lady of the dead take a little here and a little there, play between the sacred and the profane to adapt to the rules of a vein where being original is now a more unique than rare quality. And even in this case there is little that is actually surprising, but overall the vision proves to be effective and entertaining, able to intercept the expectations of the target to which it is addressed with a certain grip.
Conclusions
Manager of a funeral home, she is suddenly widowed and decides to investigate the death of her husband, who disappeared in a car accident still without culprit. The truth that the protagonist will find out threatens to blow many excellent heads in the small community where she lives and her family will be in grave danger, while she has now become an implacable angel of vengeance. As we told you in the review of Totenfrau – The Lady of the Dead, the adaptation of the novel of the same name lives in six episodes full of tension and with a fair number of twists, some predictable and some less, offering an enjoyable genre entertainment . A story where a mystery is gradually revealed that shows the innermost depths of the human soul and in which the only way to respond to violence is with equal, cathartic, ferocity.
Because we like it
- An ambiguous and ruthless protagonist at the right point in her quest for private justice.
- Six episodes with a high tension rate, able to leave the viewer in suspense until the final showdown.
What’s wrong
- The screenplay, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, is at times derivative and predictable.
