Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Woman Of The Dead’ On Netflix, Where An Undertaker Investigates Who Wanted Her Husband Dead

In Woman Of The Dead, a funeral director in a small ski resort town digs deep into that town’s secrets after her husband is killed right in front of her. Of course, any small-town-with-secrets thriller should be full of quirky people. But what we like best is when the show’s protagonist has a lot of quirks. That’s certainly what we get in this series.

WOMAN OF THE DEAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A sailboat on the open sea. A woman sunbathes on the bow with headphones on, listening to an old iPod. People start screaming for help. We flash between this and the same woman, working at the funeral home she owns.

The Gist: Brunhilde Blum (Anna Maria Mühe), who is known around town as “Blum”, is an undertaker in her tiny German mountain town. She sometimes imagines the corpses she works on talking to her. When her assistant, Reza Shadid (Yousef Sweid) tells her that the family of the person she’s working on bought a standard casket that was too small, she takes out her bone saw.

Her husband, Mark Thaler (Maiximilian Kraus), is a local cop, and when he comes back after a trip, Blum sees him talking on a yellow phone she’s never seen. He just says he bought a new case. But when he gets on his Ducati to go to work, he’s hit as he turns out onto the road, and the Range Rover that hit him drives away after pausing for a minute.

Blum is convinced it wasn’t an accident, and a memorial service at the local ski resort, owned by Johanna Schönborn (Michou Friez), whom Mark’s dad Karl (Hans Uwe Bauer) calls the “ice queen”, she isn’t made to feel any different. As she leaves, Mark’s commander, Wilhelm Danzberger (Robert Palfrader) asks her to bring back his service weapon; Blum is shocked that he didn’t have it with him.

A week goes by and Blum finds out that the police haven’t been investigating Mark’s death with the fervor that Danzberger promised, and she confronts the commander, threatening to go to the local paper. When she tries to find Mark’s gun, she finds in his jacket a train ticket and a chocolate snack with milk in it, which he’d never eat due to being lactose intolerant.

The local mechanic offers to restore the Ducati, whose engine was surprisingly intact after the accident. Mark’s partner, Massimo Ricci (Felix Klare), finds her there and they go for coffee, where Blum asks if Mark was having an affair. A few flashbacks show their close bond; the two of them met when she was on that boat sunbathing; when she realized her parents hadn’t come back from their swim, she flagged down Mark’s boat for help.

When she gets the Ducati back, she sees the phone in the storage compartment. She calls a mysterious number, and a woman answers. Based on texts, she goes out to the woods and finds a woman named Dunja (Romina Kuper), bruised and scared out of her wits.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Woman Of The Dead (Original title: Totenfrau) has a bit of the same feel as Mare Of Easttown, though the title character here has a personal involvement in the central murder case.

Our Take: Based on Bernhard Aichner’s novel of the same name, it seems that Woman Of The Dead is a fairly straightforward small-town-with-secrets thriller, but with characters who have some interesting personality quirks. Those quirks, of course, start with Blum herself; her relationship with Mark is wrapped up in the tragedy that killed her parents, so there’s all sorts of implications in his death. And when her mind wanders as she works to prepare corpses for their funerals, it really wanders.

But, as most small-town dramas go, everyone around has something dark going on. Massimo’s wife Ute (Andrea Wenzl) gets inexplicably drunk during Mark’s memorial. The whole town seems to work for Schönborn when tourist season starts. Schönborn herself seems to be covering something up but we’re not sure what it is.

As Blum probes deeper into the case, getting into increasingly dangerous situations, we wonder if the quirks are going to even out and give way to the thriller aspect of the series. We hope it doesn’t. The quirks are there to help make the characters something other than archetypes, and they don’t have to be at all intrusive to be effective.

We suspect that Blum, played by Mühe with more than enough fire to take on this mystery, even as she deals with her own baggage, will continue to fight herself as she fights the powerful Schönborn and others that may have been involved. It’ll be that performance that will determine how watchable the series is.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: When Blum tells Dunja that Mark is dead and asks her how they know each other, Dunja cries and tells Blum she shouldn’t be involved. They’re at the edge of a cliff, and Dunja ends up embracing Blum in a spate of hopelessness.

Sleeper Star: The town in the series takes place near the Austrian ski resort city of Innsbruck, and the scenery is spectacular. Credit director Nicolai Rohde and cinematographer Stephan Burchardt for that.

Most Pilot-y Line: How in the world did the storage compartment on the Ducati, which looks like a soft tote bag, stay intact? Even the sandwich Mark was going to have for lunch was still there.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Woman Of The Dead is a pretty straightforward thriller, but with a spectacular backdrop and a lead character with a tragic backstory and some personality quirks, it’s definitely worth a look.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.