Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“I dismembered my boss. I am finally free. Ha ha ha!”
As if regular toxic bosses aren’t enough, imagine being a lawyer at a reputed firm, but working for a mafia boss with anger issues, the kinds who burns a man to death in front of a bus full of children. Yeah, most of us would definitely want to either quit or murder the man. So that’s exactly what the protagonist of Netflix’s German series “Achtsam Morden” (English title: Murder Mindfully) does – he murders his mafia boss and but doesn’t exactly secure the freedom he hoped for, because now, he has to manage the mob!
Tom Schilling plays lead Björn Diemel, a lawyer who is always neck deep in work, running around getting his mafia boss’ cronies evade arrest. He has little time for his wife Katharina (Emily Cox) and adorable daughter Emily (Pamuk Pilavci) and his marriage is on the verge of breaking. To make amends, he signs up for a ‘mindfulness’ course on Katharina’s advice, which changes his life completely – he is calmer, more in control of his emotions, is able to spend quality time with his daughter, but he also becomes a murderer. Which of-course brings a whole range of new problems in his life, but thanks to his new mindful attitude towards life, he is able to navigate through them smoothly. Sort of.
Spanning eight episodes, “Achtsam Morden”/”Murder Mindfully” opens with a scene at a beautiful, peaceful lake, that’s witness to savage scenes of Björn Diemel making mince-meat out of a body he is trying to get rid of. “I’m not a violent person. Quite the opposite. I’ve never been in a fight in my whole life,” Diemel says, while moving his boss’ hacked body parts in a wheelbarrow. Diemel, who also serves as the narrator for the series, then takes back viewers to the past, to show how he became a first-time murderer at the age of 42. Sascha Alexander Gersak plays Dragan, Diemel’s volatile mafia boss, whose go-to response is violence. The plot unfolds as Diemel murders Dragan and hides the truth, claiming Dragan has gone into hiding to evade the police to everybody.
One of the funniest sub-plots in “Achtsam Morden”/”Murder Mindfully” is how almost every major character in the series is looking for a daycare for their kid(s). Diemel’s wife in-fact gives him an ultimatum to find a daycare for their daughter Emily soon or she’d move to her mother’s place. Context for foreign viewers – Germany has a huge daycare deficit problem, so much so that German language-learning books also have sections dedicated to it as a topic. How Diemel uses his mafia connections to get his kid into a day care is darkly comedic. And of course, in each episode, Diemel uses the new ‘mindful breathing’ techniques he learns, to deal with extremely stressful (and deadly) situations.
Tom Schilling is highly entertaining as Diemel, and he smoothly breaks the fourth wall (like Deadpool) in many scenes, to talk to the viewers about what’s going on in his head. Not everybody can pull off talking to the screen, but Schilling does it with effortless ease. Ironically, the only scenes that slow down “Achtsam Morden”/”Murder Mindfully”, are the flashbacks where Diemel is talking to his mindfulness instructor. However, episode 4 features a brilliant sequence, where Diemel “takes a walk with his problems”, a suggestion from the instructor, so the scene features Schilling walking through the woods with different characters, discussing what they want. It’s ingenious and amusingly entertaining.
One of my biggest complaints with the show is that the title sets up higher expectations for a stylishly violent series, something like Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, which cleverly displays both “refined aggression” (one of the episodic titles) and unhinged brutality. However, the body count and bloodied scenes in Achtsam Morden are surprisingly thin. The writers do not take any serious risks, and safely try to portray Tom Schilling’s Diemel as the “good guy caught in wrong circumstances”. Sure, his character is morally grey, makes questionable decisions, but never descends into the kind of chaos or madness that would’ve made the show outstanding. Regardless, it’s a pretty entertaining watch for the weekend!
Rating: 7 on 10. You can watch ‘Murder Mindfully’ on Netflix.
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