Paradoxically, these confinements have obviously been ingrained into Germans' expectations of their films so much that they have become almost allergic to homegrown thriller fare that reaches beyond these "Tatort" staples and beyond the small screen. Some of the most resounding flops of the 90s were expensive thrillers made by some of Germany's most prestigious directors and figuring some of Germany's biggest stars, i.e. Dominik Graf's "Die Sieger" (The Winners), a movie delivering on everything with the notable exception of box office success, and Nico Hoffmann's "Solo für Klarinette" (Clarinet Solo, 1998), a dark amour-fou-psychodrama-thriller melange that certainly bit off more than it could chew. It was an honorable attempt nonetheless, whose disappointing box office results stopped short not only Nico Hofmann's directing ambitions (he is now a very successful producer), but also made investors refrain from throwing their money (and there was a lot of stupid money) at genre productions for some time.

Things arguably changed for the better with "Anatomie" (Anatomy, 2000), a horror movie starring Franka Potente that was a huge success domestically, with even some repercussions on international markets. In 2002 former "Tatort" writer Robert Schwentke made "Tattoo", a thriller in the "Seven" vein that was technically accomplished enough to land Schwentke a Hollywood directing gig with Disney's Hitchcockian thriller "Flight Plan" starring Jodie Foster. So now comes debutant Mennan Yapo, supported and produced by German director wunderkind Tom Tykwer (Lola rennt, Run Lola Run), and does not fear to tread where Jean-Pierre Melville and Luc Besson have made their impact in film history. "Lautlos" (The Silent Killer) is a film about a professional killer played by German star Joachim Król. Król is a rather surprising choice, having played awkward and shy outsiders you pity rather than fear for most of his career. He did not kill for this job, but he gave up the very lucrative engagement as Commissare Brunetti in the German TV version of million seller Donna Leon's mystery novels for his "Lautlos" role. He trained for a half a year and truly is a leaner and - even - more menacing version of his old self, to some degree.

The film opens with a scene of a murder. The killer manages to silently murder a police investigator in front of the eyes and ears of an observation crew without their even noticing it. The only thing that gets in the way is the woman sleeping in the policeman's bed. He leaves her unscathed and we soon realize that in these moments he has fallen for her. The movie soon turns into the portrait of a killer with a crush on the woman he almost killed and who, in turn, he even saves when she jumps from a bridge for no very obvious reason. This is not the only cliché the script relies very heavily upon, adding a dying father figure, a Eastern European evil master mind, a smart profiler, a childhood trauma to this mixed and very crowded bag of a story. The movie's most jarring weakness is in the script, with dialogue that is clunky and would-be-laconic at the same time. All the actors, with the exception of excellent Nadja Uhl, seem to be in serious trouble making any emotional connection to the words coming out of their mouths. The script, by the way, was written by already the second film critic turned screenwriter within a year (after Tobias Kniebe with "Fremder Freund"), Lars-Olav Beier, a genre buff now writing for Germany's leading news magazine DER SPIEGEL (who, following a tradition with this magazine, has deteriorated from an excellent analyst of genre film to a scribe who ostentatively and haughtily loathes art film).

It comes as a surprise, then, that in spite of these considerable downsides the movie still works most of the time. Mennan Yapo, a German director of Turkish origin, certainly has made one of the most broodingly unfunny movies you will meet in quite some time, but he very obviously knows what he is doing, using almost unobtrusive style to create an atmosphere of cold beauty. He is very ably supported in his endeavor by his set designer and, above all, by cinematographer Torsten Lippstock who tends to leave backgrounds out of focus in favor of what is immediately in front of his lense. And with good reason: he imbues his pictures with a brownish tint that gives them a painterly beauty in earthen colors, and he manages to conjure up a kind of material yet transparent, palpable yet weightless light in his images. I often wished I could just silence the dialogue and also the heavily technoid score to just behold Lippstock's beauties lavishly wrapping an undeserving story into an atmosphere that, in the end, even convinces you of mercifully forgetting plot holes and plot convolutions, witless dialogue and a script that never really comes together. Also, and this is no mean feat, when this generally very low and brooding film decides to turn into real thriller gear, it is very effective and makes you wish it did have a bit less on its mind than it believes it has. The last murder, for example, is the most cruel but also the only funny moment in "Lautlos", a film that should have let the images speak for themselves. It is not so "lautlos" (silent) a movie after all.

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