Where exactly does a lie begin? Where is the line between truth and imagination? For forensic psychologist Dr. Karla Eckhardt (Julia Koschitz) criminal cases are much more than just the search for a guilty party. When a psychologist is found murdered on the Viennese bank of the Danube, Anna Lobrecht (Mercedes Müller), a former patient of Eckhardt, turns herself in to the police that same night as the perpetrator.
But appearances are deceptive, the intelligent Anna is a compulsive liar, and a psychological duel begins for Karla Eckhardt that will literally bring her to the brink of the abyss. The ice-cold thriller “In the Shadow of Fear – You Shall Not Lie”, a co-production by ZDF and ORF, runs on Monday at 8:15 p.m. in the second.
Convince with Viennese charm
The first episode of the top-class series already ran in 2019, now there is a reunion with Julia Koschitz as a soul explorer in the borderline area. According to ZDF, the Austrian actress says about her role: “I liked the character of Karla Eckardt from the start because she is idiosyncratic. With all her high sensitivity, she sometimes seems helpless in real life, outside the clinic. She is bulky, follows her Sometimes she walks in questionable ways and makes mistakes along the way. But she always puts herself at risk.”
So it is good that the resolute policewoman Irene Radek (Susi Stach) is at Eckhardt’s side: the woman lights a cigarette when the body is found, drives the car much too fast, and is satisfied when she has a confessed suspect to show. The two very different investigators make a compelling team in this intricate case that stretches far back into the past.
The alleged murderer Anna is the daughter of the housekeeper Margarete Lobrecht (Johanna Orsini), her father was a Catholic priest who died 15 years ago in a fire under mysterious circumstances. Anna had to deny her origins from an early age, which is why she became a notorious liar. That’s the theory of Karla Eckhardt, who is absorbed by the case and hardly has time for her tenderly burgeoning liaison with the pianist Peter (Michele Cuciuffo).
When another suspect comes into play in the form of the choleric nurse Martin Heller (Thomas Schubert), who has fallen in love with the liar Anna, Eckhardt’s thesis begins to falter. Finally, her sensitive friend Peter is seriously injured in an argument with the unpredictable Heller, Karla is devastated.
Director Till Endemann (“Lucy is now a gangster”), who is also responsible for the screenplay together with Paul Salisbury, has staged an atmospherically dense thriller that sometimes seems a bit constructed. But the actors easily make up for this: Julia Koschitz skilfully drifts between fragility and determination, her partner Susi Stach convinces with Viennese humor and down-to-earthness. Mercedes Müller shines as a pathological liar, victim and perpetrator all in one.
In addition, there is Thomas Schubert (“Red Sky”) in the role of the unhappily in love muscle man and, on the other hand, Michele Cuciuffo as a sensitive lover. In addition, cameraman Tobias von dem Borne stylishly immersed the waltz city of Vienna in grey-monochrome colors – not a trace of the beautiful blue Danube far and wide.
