Dear Child: active compassion overcomes horror

I didn't think I was going to be able to stomach this German series on Netflix when I realised it was about the fallout from a Fritzl-type abduction. Yet the performances from the start seemed so strong, so real, that I felt humanity was going to play a stronger part than it usual does in thrillers. And this has the bare bones of the suspense drama, but seems much more interested in spending time with what's going on in the victims' heads, and how those around them might help them. 

Yes, there's an awful lot of blood and wounds, but no gratuitous lingering on violence. Instead we spend most time with the parents of the vanished girl Karin (Julika Jenkins and Justus von Dohnányi pictured above) and the mentally unwell police officer who became their friend (Hans Löw) as well as the 'Lena' who escapes (Kim Riedle); we get, I think, a genuine sense of what 13 years of not knowing can do to people. I haven't seen that before in dramatisation of such horrors. It's Germanic in not admitting many (if any) laughs, but not as doggedly so as the wearing dystopian drama Dark, which I followed just to see what would happen next.

Here I felt confident that there would be some kind of positive outcome among all the human wreckage. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that there is, if only it encourages other people to watch. There are lacerating portrayals from all the actors concerned, but I have no idea how Naila Schuberth was coached to play the unnerving child, 12 year old Hannah, at the centre of it all so well. The take on her little brothe Jonathan (Sammy Schrein) is heartbreaking. Watch if you feel strong enough.