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Der Tote am Teich is a TV movie, and it definitely feels like one. Although the story is well-thought, its simplistic plot-driven narrative and lack of character makes Der Tote am Teich earn no more than 5 starts.

In Der Tote am Teich - in Brazil, weirdly translated into The Ice Lake; free translation seems to be "The Dead Man at the Pond", which makes more sense. Anyway... -, retired investigator Sepp Ahorner finds a dead body at a local pond. Cause of dead, bludgeoning by an object that belonged to Sepp's uncle. Struggling to find meaning in life, Sepp takes the opportunity to do a little bit of informal investigation on his own.

Der Tote am Teich feels like one of those Christmas-themed movies. I guess this happens because Der Tote am Teich is light in tone, PG-13. However, this movie has two major flaws.

The first flaw is the lack of strong lead characters. Sepp seems to be the main character, but so does Grete and Lisa. In the end, though, we see no character development for all of them. Sepp seems to already have moved on from a tragic event, and we get no view of Grete's or Lisa's background. This lack of character development makes the ending scene out of place with the movie we've watched.

The second flaw is that there's no sense of danger. The plot centers around finding out who is the murderer, but there's no risk of the murderer ever doing the deed again, or even leaving. I guess the only risk is that they could either falsely accuse someone or never find the criminal - there are no heavy stakes.

Other than these two flaws, Der Tote am Teich delivers a simplistic story that comes and goes. You can endure the short 90 minutes of its length, and, in the end, the final revelation is, at least, clever enough, but not good enough to raise this movie to the spotlight.

I am just passing by to say that this movie constantly makes me feel like I am losing something. But in the end everything made sense. I mean, sometimes it is as if there is no investigation at all, it is like we are just watching these people everyday life there in a frozen Austria. The sub plot is funny with the detective's cat. But if I take in consideration the suspects of commiting the muder, well, these are even funnier. A drunk, a macho curling player... I would also highlight the character of the younger detective, who is a girl and is constantly non satisfied with her routine. She passed a sensation of total lack of confort to me. European detective stories are always very distinct because it seems that no one is actually a cop there. Maybe if one inserted a passion encounter there, this could turn into a drama or a romance. But it was cool anyways. I mean, despite feeling that these people made me feel like a fool, it was cool.

In imdb, this is listed as der tote am teich, while roku has this listed as frozen lake. When a dead body is found on a lake in austria, the cops move in to investigate, led by grete öller. And someone has removed the wildlife cams which would have caught the murder. The english dubbing is pretty awful. Grete does her best to follow the clues, but is treated badly by most of the townspeople along the way. And how involved is the retired town copper? He seems to know more than he is telling. Is he just being helpful? It's quite good! One of the many imported films being dubbed into english, as hollywood was on strike for so long. The dubbing was pretty weak, but otherwise fine. Directed by nikolaus leytner. Written by susanne freund.

In short: a good plot, nice photography, it probably deserves a 9/10 rating. But italian dubbing is irritating. Terrible voice actors, it seems like they hired the first people who passed by on the street to do the dubbing... They absolutely can't act, seem to do that as weekend hobby, together with a completely wrong dubbing voices equalization and missing any kind of effect making everything awful and disturbing as a whole.

As a result, I'm sorry to say I couldn't get past the first 30 minutes, just to avoid having a nervous breakdown caused by the characters dubbed voices. No doubt the movie could deserve a better dubbing company than that.