If you grew up on a desert island and only saw German crime films, you would know that the pharmaceutical industry really didn’t give a damn about the well-being of mankind compared to the well-being of their accounts. A gang of unscrupulous, money-hungry greedy suckers who put profit above all else, above all morality.
This is indeed a cliché that is largely unsupported by empirical evidence, as it is often the case in German crime films, but it persists – probably due to some pills of some sort.
It gets particularly bad when a professional group comes into play whose depravity one could also get a lasting impression of in the recordings on the island – lawyers.
The digression was long, but necessary. Because Zurich’s new “crime scene” is called “risks with side effects” and is about a pharmaceutical company that wants to bring a life-saving new drug onto the market, the testing of which has killed a few people, but no one is allowed to know. It should cost about as much as a human life, so it should be almost priceless.
And because 14-year-old Karla is in excruciating pain after taking the drug, the company sends a typical Zurich Gold Coast law firm lawyer after her and her recalcitrant mother. But it turns out to be not quite as unscrupulous as desired. Then she lies dead in Lake Zurich.
It is winter. Everyone is a bit afraid of that at the moment. With some justification. And you should also put on something warm before you turn on the television, turning up the heating is forbidden. A coat, perhaps, like the one inspector Ott rides through Zurich on her bike.
It doesn’t get really homey anywhere. Not in the council estate where Karla and her mother live, not in the investigation rooms, not in the wood-panelled offices, not in the germ-free laboratories, not on the streets and not on the lake over which Inspector Grandjean is rowing. Everything chills you.
Zurich, the whole story in general, is a study in gray, just like winter, you don’t have to be a Berliner to be able to judge that, it’s not a season of strong contrasts. There is no cliché that does not exist in this case, but none of them last particularly long. There is everything that is needed for a classic pharmaceutical crime thriller, the profile-addicted super researcher, the cold head of the law firm, the pharmacologist who has been left behind, the half-witted entrepreneur, the uncompromising mother of complaints.
But maybe because it’s so cold through every crack in the city by the lake, no cliché really boils up here. “Risks with side effects” operates a pleasant willful contamination of preconceived notions of professionals and their families. Hardly anyone is strictly what he usually is in eve crime films. Everything mixes, it doesn’t stay black and white. It’s going gray on the Gold Coast.
You follow the two inspectors from station to station. Despite its grayness, “Risks with Side Effects” is a remarkably clearly organized crime film. And one likes to follow the inspectors. It’s not particularly difficult because the tempo is quite leisurely. Any offensive mare biting is foreign to the two. They keep their distance, but don’t constantly tease each other. They approach the world from different directions.
If they are now sent back into even more complex caves of Swiss propriety as the double probes they are supposed to be than in “risks with side effects”, that would of course not be a bad thing. Not every crime film has to tell a cliché fulfillment story. Maybe one day someone will invent a vaccine against it.
