It’s interesting when a series about a small town with secrets reveals a lot of those secrets in its first season, then takes a turn. Woman Of The Dead is a show like that; after the end of the first season, the show started to take a turn from being about an undertaker trying to find out who killed her husband to a thriller about a woman who is now keeping some secrets of her own.
Opening Shot: A woman is plunged in the water and flails around. “They say it’s only when you’ve lost everything that you realize what truly happens,” says a woman’s voice. “The problem is, by then it may be too late.”
The Gist: Two years after killing and dismembering the person who killed her husband, we see Brunhilde Blum (Anna Maria Mühe), whom everyone calls “Blum”, taking self-defense training. We also see her at home, in the same building where her mortuary business is located. She’s doing typical mom stuff, like telling her teenage daughter Nela (Emilia Pieske) to get off her phone and making sure her son Karl (Hans-Uwe Bauer) does his homework. Reza Shadid (Yousef Sweid) has moved in with Blum and her kids.
He notices that in the cemetery in town, a grave is being dug up in order for the police to get DNA from a body for an inheritance dispute. It’s someone she prepared to be buried two years prior, and she put body parts from one of the two people she killed in with that person. It leads the two of them to go to the cemetery in the dark of night to try to retrieve all the parts. But when they’re spotted, they have to leave; Blum knows that she doesn’t have all the parts, including the victim’s head.
Blum knows that the police will find the rest of the parts, and the next day, we see lead detective Wilhelm Denzberger (Robert Palfrader) called to the scene at the cemetery. When he spots a certain ring on one of the disembodied hands, he knows that the hand belongs to the missing son of Johanna Schönborn (Michou Friez), the owner of the local ski resort and a very powerful figure in the small mountain town.
Major Brigit Wallner (Britta Hammelstein) of the Criminal Intelligence Service is called in, as she was two years prior, and she feels that Blum is her strongest person of interest. But with no physical evidence linking her to the bodies, Wallner has to see if Blum will come in for questioning voluntarily. Blum decides to take her late husband’s Ducati out of town, but ends up fighting a strange man rifling through her files instead.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Woman Of The Dead (Original title: Totenfrau) gave us a Mare Of Easttown feel in Season 1, but now we need to throw in a little bit of Breaking Bad into the mix.
Our Take: While Woman Of The Dead still has a lot of elements of the “small town with secrets” drama that it was in Season 1, the story direction has changed. Now Blum is trying to keep from having her crimes connected to her. And, even though her crimes were in conjunction with revenge for the murder of her husband, they are pretty brutal nonetheless.
No matter what Blum has done, though, Anna Maria Mühe makes her easy to root for. After all, she’s had her husband ripped away from her. She still imagines the people whose bodies she cares for before their burial can talk to her. And the people she’s up against, like Johanna and her family, are up to all sorts of no good. So, even though Blum has committed some of her own heinous acts, it’s all in the service of finding answers.
If you’re not sure about Johanna’s complicity in some shady doings, her brief meeting with a burly man named Badal Sarkissian (Peter Kurth) should put those doubts to bed. He’s a guy who breaks fingers, or at least has a henchperson break them for him, and he seems to be intimately involved with Johanna’s plans to build a new hotel.
There’s also the complicating factor of Nela’s relationship with Johanna’s nephew Alex (Tristian Lopez). She’s trying to keep Alex’s identity from Blum, for obvious reasons. How is Blum going to react when she finds out?
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After missing out on grabbing Blum, a man decides to go to “Plan B,” as he texts to someone, and he grabs Nela instead.
Sleeper Star: Britta Hammelstein’s character Brigit Wallner is a pretty typical hard-driven detective, but she’s also a good antagonist for Blum.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Wallner asks Blum how she got a cut on her face, Blum replies, “It was a coffin lid. Dangerous profession.” Those coffin lids pack a heck of a punch, don’t they?
Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s plenty of intrigue in Season 2 of Woman Of The Dead, even if the tone of the show has shifted a bit.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
