Crime Scene: Destructive Love: The Penultimate Borowski “Crime Scene”

Addiction is a fatal disease. And she doesn’t always necessarily crave substances – there are also many non-material addictions, such as work, shopping, sport – or even sex. She becomes the downfall of the cheerful insurance employee Andrea Gonzor (Anna König). A short time after she invited people to a group sex evening via an Internet platform, she was shot dead in her bed.

A tough nut to crack for “crime scene” investigator Klaus Borowski, who is played soberly by Axel Milberg, and his colleague Mila Sahin (Almila Bagriacik). Their penultimate case together, “Borowski and the Hungry Heart” (January 12th, 8:15 p.m. on Erste, then in the ARD Mediathek), turns out to be particularly delicate. It’s also delicate because Andrea wasn’t a professional sex worker – but met men for her pleasure. The circumstances of her death raise questions. A friend, young Nele Krüger (Laura Balzer), finds the dead woman and appears extremely disturbed. The murder victim’s relationship with a dentist recently broke down.

The case gradually sheds light on interesting aspects of love or sex addiction and provides insights into the psychology of the staff. The realization that an addict uses desire to fill a hole in their soul sheds a nuanced light on the issue of sex addiction. The dentist is at least suspicious and doesn’t seem likeable either. The angry household had already collected the times of the moans of love from the apartment of the murdered for the property management.

Borowski isn’t comfortable with the topic at first and prefers to leave the field work to Mila Sahin. Almila Bagriacik reveals completely new, even private, facets of her character when she undercover explores a parking lot for outdoor love meetings with a previous affair. For Borowski, in turn, it is enough to discuss what is happening during a cooking evening with his boss and friend Roland Schladitz (Thomas Kügel). Too much closeness is rather scary for him.

“We destroy perfect immediately”

And so Borowski soon finds himself on the slippery ice when the unstable Nele Krüger misinterprets his trained offers to build trust and develops a special desire. When she utters sentences like “We can’t be perfect, we’ll destroy perfect immediately,” alarm bells ring in the viewer.

Laura Balzer as Nele Krüger is the main character and focus of this case. She convincingly embodies the complex psychological conflict of a precarious, single mother. About the dead woman, with whom she had not only a friendship but also a spiritual need, she says the remarkable sentence: “Isn’t that unfair. Men who have a lot of sex are real guys – but women are still sluts.”

The case throws an interesting spotlight on a scene in the dark, on group meetings of anonymous sex addicts, on selfishness and self-centeredness and the dramatic consequences for the social environment. The fact that director Maria Solrun focuses on different women and their different concepts of desire – romantic, love-addicted, non-committal – is one of the strengths of this case. In the end, it is these psychological aspects of the characters that are even more convincing than the solution to the actual case.

The last Kiel “Tatort” with Axel Milberg as Borowski will be shown on March 16th on the first. The episode is titled “Borowski and the Head of Medusa.”