"Die Toten von Hameln" is a German mystery thriller from last year starring (stunning as always) Julia Koschitz ("Shoppen"), Bjarne Mädel (German "The Office" and Matthias Habich (has acted for 50 years now). The film clearly references the famous rat catcher tale about a man who makes a contract with the townspeople to catch all their rats. He does so, but is not given his reward, so as punishment he also abducts all the children from the village.
The central character here is played by Koschitz, a woman with a choir of school girls and (as you may have expected) some of the girls get lost in a cave apparently. Just like her boyfriend. So she teams up with the local policeman (her ex-boyfriend) to find and save them. The woman's father and aunt play a mysterious role in this whole endeavor, one that may have hurt the film more than it helped, especially when a strange curse and potions are involved. The final world war reference story did not help at all either.
The movie is directed by Christian von Castelberg, who worked on many German television productions already. The writing team were two sisters, one of them with lots of experience as well. Here and there we have a few plot holes sadly, like how would they know that the other dead scientist had exactly the right place where the girls would be. Anyway, all in all, it is not a great film at all. It has its moments, but these are not frequent and convincing enough to let me recommend this movie.
The central character here is played by Koschitz, a woman with a choir of school girls and (as you may have expected) some of the girls get lost in a cave apparently. Just like her boyfriend. So she teams up with the local policeman (her ex-boyfriend) to find and save them. The woman's father and aunt play a mysterious role in this whole endeavor, one that may have hurt the film more than it helped, especially when a strange curse and potions are involved. The final world war reference story did not help at all either.
The movie is directed by Christian von Castelberg, who worked on many German television productions already. The writing team were two sisters, one of them with lots of experience as well. Here and there we have a few plot holes sadly, like how would they know that the other dead scientist had exactly the right place where the girls would be. Anyway, all in all, it is not a great film at all. It has its moments, but these are not frequent and convincing enough to let me recommend this movie.
