Midsummer Night's Murder

Surprisingly warm human story. Good acting and casting crew. Very good camera work (for a tv movie) and beautiful Austrian Tirol scenery. Movie is crime genre but has some warm comedy elements. Non violent and very relaxing to watch. Basically,kind of movies that are very rare these days to find in cloaca maxima of Hollywood movies .Managed to discover this on Euro-channel.

This TV movie is part of the "LandKrimi" series, which as the name suggests, deals with crime on the countryside of Austria. The individual entries in the series are not connected to each other and (with a few exceptions) present one-time police teams in one of the nine Austrian provinces at work. The average quality is pretty good, I have seen about 15 episodes of the over 30 episodes and there are more in production. Unfortunately, this is the by far worst episode I have seen. The screenplay is by Felix Mitterer, a well known dramatist, director and actor, who often shows his fellow Tyrolleans in a very critical light. This time though, he seems to have gone far over the top, trying to mix too much together and using an uncharacteristic amount of stereotypes when presenting countrymen and women of his homeland. The characters reminded me of woodcuts, no greys, just black and white. Katharina Strasser, had a very unbelievable role a a police officer who played it very tough but behaved very silly. Throughout the film she receives threatening and insulting messages on her phone which she more or less ignores and never really get explained. At one point I could not take the whole story serious, it was getting more and more ridiculous. A waste of time and talents!