Marianne Atzeroth-Freier: Film “The Invisibles”: In the baboon cage

Marianne Atzeroth-Freier works in a terrible baboon cage, the Hamburg murder squad. She was one of the first women in this professional field in Germany in the 1980s – and things were rough on the male-dominated guard. When the inspector investigates the suspicion that a missing person report could turn out to be a murder case, she is met with brutal ignorance from her colleagues. They are convinced that where there are no bodies, the murder squad has no business. It later emerges that the murderer that Atzeroth’s suitor has in mind here, Lutz Reinstrom, was covered up by a police officer who was friends with him, albeit unknowingly.

It takes initiative, going through files after work and a new, young colleague who is a lot less stupid than the older ones to get the case started. In the end, Atzeroth-Freier played a leading role in ensuring that Reinstrom, the so-called acid barrel murderer in Hamburg, was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996. Reinstrom tortured two, probably three, women to death in the bunker beneath his property and then buried the body parts in vats of acid on his property.

With “The Invisibles,” director Matthias Freier made a documentary about the work of his stepmother, who died in 2017, in the Hamburg police, with an almost exclusive focus on the Reinstrom case. The film works on different levels: as a reconstruction of the investigative methods of a murder squad in the early 1990s, as an examination of a professional field dominated by men and as a homage to a female investigator who, in addition to many other skills such as deductive thinking and persistence, gave her colleagues empathy with others sacrifices ahead.

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The latter may sound somewhat schematic and idealized in this summary, but it was actually that simple. In the homicide squad, there is a concentrated patriarchal defensive struggle, with everything that goes with it: the inability to simply listen to women (investigators and victims), traditional hierarchies that bring with them corresponding dysfunctions, and in the end the very brazen appropriation of the success of others. During her lifetime, Marianne Atzeroth-Freier received no public recognition of her investigative success, unlike the head of the murder squad.

The Amazon Prime series “Tied,” which was released in 2023, put the case in a comparatively lurid form. The focus was on the murderer and, above all, on his sexual pathology. In “The Invisibles” Reinstrom can only be heard once, on an audio recording, in “Tied” he actually talks continuously, the series is almost intoxicated by the violence he perpetrates – an always lurking danger in the true crime genre. Freier’s film, on the other hand, impresses with its sobriety: there is no sense of fascination with perpetrators here, the film primarily tells a history of institutions and how these institutions change, which is also reflected in the biographies of the individual actors. Sobriety here also means that “The Invisibles” avoids any form of tension building. The dismemberment of two women is not allowed here entertaining be. One can also understand Matthias Freier’s film, which would be another level, as an implicit criticism of its own genre.

“The Invisibles” is not particularly exciting in terms of form – talking heads interviews, documentary material and somewhat lamely staged scenes – but it is still very worth seeing. Not least because the film combines two different investigative methods and thus makes two different views of the world visible. One insists on “We’ve always done it this way” and the power that comes with it. The other person starts from what he finds and does not see the victims’ immediate impact as a shortcoming and their speaking as disruptive noise, but rather sees the potential for insight in this.

“The Invisibles”, Germany 2023. Director: Matthias Freier. With Marianne Atzeroth-Freier, Cornelia Uetrecht, Elke Lorenz, Constanze Andree, Claudia Harrbrücker. 98 min. Now in the cinema.

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