Hans-Christian Schmid, Germany 2022
What happens within a well-known, wealthy family when one of its members is kidnapped? That’s the central premise of WIR SIND DANN WOHL DIE ANGEHÖRIGEN (WE ARE NEXT OF KIN). The film tells the true story of the high-profile 1996 kidnapping of German millionaire Jan Philipp Reemtsma from the perspective of his then 13-year-old son, Johann Scheerer.
The film kicked off this year’s Filmfest Hamburg, yet it was a bit of a letdown. For four weeks in 1996, the kidnapping of the millionaire heir to the Reemtsma cigarette company dominated the media. It made the vast majority of Germany’s ultra-wealthy reticent to show themselves in public, let alone to flaunt their wealth. And that secretiveness has remained the case right up until today.
So, viewers’ expectations were high that this film – based on Scheerer’s 2018 book by the same name – would shed some insider’s light on the psychological and social impact of this seminal event in the world of Germany’s wealthy.
But for an hour and 58 minutes, the film instead stuck like glue to the day-by-day timeline of the four-week-long kidnapping drama. Most scenes centered around son Johann (Claude Heinrich) and his mother Ann Kathrin (Adina Vetter), waiting for calls from the kidnappers in their Hamburg villa. Policemen come and go and come again. The family lawyer (Justus von Dohnányi) sticks around. At least Dohnányi, one of Germany’s most talented actors, delivers in this role a fine acting performance and some zingers to the dialog now and again.
And eventually, after many scenes of ringing telephones in a dim villa living room, Jan Philipp Reemtsma returns. That’s the entire plot, and it’s a well-covered plot that most Germans born by the early 1990s already knew. This film could have been so much more. ()