“Dear Child”: That’s what the new Netflix hit is about

A woman wanders through an endless forest at night, somewhere in the dark no-man’s land near Aachen. While escaping in her nightgown, she runs in front of a car on the forest road. She only survives her first moment of freedom thanks to emergency surgery. But that is by no means their biggest problem. The Netflix series “Dear Child” begins where other material has a happy ending – and this is where its nastiness begins.

The man in her mid-thirties obviously killed the man who once kidnapped her to a remote private prison, who forced her to follow bizarre rules, who raped her. And she soon realizes that this nameless man and his terrible basement still have power over her.

The secret star of this six-part series is the child actress Naila Schuberth (“Dangerous Closeness”), born in 2011. She plays the role of twelve-year-old Hannah, who is picked up by the rescue workers at the scene of the accident unharmed. Her little brother Jonathan, on the other hand, is still left in the horror cellar.

Once fathered by the kidnapper, Hannah knows nothing other than his prison world, enriched with knowledge that comes from Brockhaus and home schooling. For both – crude rules and world knowledge – she is a model student. She raises both palms in greeting. Hannah: “The nails have to be clean and you can’t hide anything in your hand that could hurt yourself or someone else. That’s the rule.” The child, rescued in the forest with the woman, remains obscure. Is it an angel or a messenger of evil?

Also haunting is the appearance of Hans Löw (“I am your human”) as an LKA investigator and former neighbor of an abductee. Is the woman lying unconscious in the intensive care unit at the clinic possibly Lena from Neuss, who disappeared in 2010? 13 years without a single hot lead and now such a gift from God? Lena’s parents also cling to this hope and are soon plunged into a rollercoaster of emotions in which even the DNA tests lead to more scary questions than answers. The template of the same name for “Liebes Kind” comes from Romy Hausmann and was one of the most successful crime novels of 2019, the book also won the Crime Cologne Award.