Dealing with and negotiating the really big questions in life in just 90 minutes is an ambitious undertaking, to put it mildly. Commissioners Eisner and Fellner try anyway - and get tangled up in a very broad topic between performance optimization and dementia.
What happens?
After a training ride with the racing bike group, the up-and-coming IT specialist Marlon Unger (Felix Oitzinger) is stabbed to death in front of his apartment door. Although Unger was known within the company as a pleasant colleague and in private as a likeable and cheerful person, the Viennese inspectors Fellner (Adele Neuhauer) and Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) do not know exactly what to think of the murdered man: Unger knew him at work no friends, but also rationalized away her girlfriend's father's job without batting an eyelid.
Meanwhile, detective assistant Meret Schande (Christina Scherrer) has her own problems with her bosses: what she sees as inefficient and outdated investigative work by Eisner and Fellner brings shame to despair. She doesn't feel seen by her senior superiors and sets out on her own - with fatal consequences.
What is it really about?
To lost souls at all stops in life. Whether it's the career-hungry IT guy, the murdered man's mother with dementia, a lathe operator who has rationalized away after 38 years of work, or his not-so-young daughter with dreams of being an artist and a bar job: they're all looking for their own answers to the really big questions. But nobody can find her.
Away-Zapp-Moment?
"I work an average of 82.7 hours a week," says the murdered man's closest colleague. Just an example sentence for the badly exaggerated figure of the overambitious software specialist Cistota (Arnold Postlmayr).
Wow-Factor?
The park bench scene with Fellner and Eisner in front of the nursing home: the two investigators are seized with the cold breath of transience as they look at the decrepit bodies. But not with the two of them, they want to celebrate life, get a little intimate with each other if you please - and then, surprised by their own chutzpah, are "too tired". Yes, that's how it is...
How was it?
5 to 8 out of 10 points. This "crime scene" is really hard to rate. How many points it gets depends very much on how far you are willing to separate the different aspects from one another: "What kind of world is that" comes up with beautiful pictures and a bunch of good ideas, such as the subjective camera (Point of view) from Shame's perspective in one of the opening scenes. Unfortunately, many ideas are only touched upon and not told, so "What kind of a world is that" seems very arbitrary and clumsy at times.
