Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Close To Home: Murder In The Coalfield’ on Netflix, A German Mystery Where A Detective’s Past Becomes A Part Of His Murder Investigation

Murder In The Coalfield, which first premiered on German television in 2022, is Netflix’s newest crime thriller. The six-part series rolled into the Netflix Top 10 this week, and the show about the mysterious death of a teenage girl whose body was found in a German coalfield is dark, complicated and definitely worth a look.

MURDER IN THE COALFIELD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Wind blows through a grassy field as a narrator says, “There’s always been those who belong. And there’s always those on the outside. There’s always those who take everything and those who lose everything.” Flashes of a group of girls picnicking are interspersed with the camera’s long, unbroken shot panning through the grass, until it stops on a cold, dead hand.

The Gist: That hand is attached to a dead 17-year-old girl named Ramona (Jule Hermann), whose body was left in a shallow pool of water by a field in Lauchhammer, Germany. The field is the site of a brown coal mine where the Bagger 293, one of the world’s largest bucket wheel excavators operates. Ramona’s body was discovered by tourists taking a tour of the Bagger 293 and spotted her from high atop an elevated platform. (Quick tangent: Bagger 293 is a real thing, and I only know that because my son has a book about the world’s largest vehicles. Gotta love it when your toddler’s book about big, tough vehicles collides with your assignment to watch a show about a murdered teen.)

Maik Briegand (Misel Maticevic) is the primary detective working the murder case and Lauchhammer is his hometown. He’s joined by Annalena Gottknecht (Odine Johne), a new, by-the-book investigator who just arrived to town. After they survey the crime scene, a police officer named Pötschke (Marc Hosemann), who is assisting them, recognizes the dead body and throws up. The girl, he explains, is the daughter of a woman he once dated, though he claims he’s no longer in touch. (FALSE! But more on that in a few.)

Maik begins to gathers evidence. Someone near the crime scene said they heard the sound of a saxophone nearby, so Maik makes his way to a group of transient climate warriors who live in a nearby forest who don’t seem to know much about Ramona or a saxophone, and then he checks out a local newspaper warehouse that’s actually a secret drug lab. The woman in charge of the drug operation, Kotzian, warns one of the men in her group, Juri, that they need to clean up the facility because the police are investigating Ramona’s murder. Juri looks stricken because he knows Ramona – he was her boyfriend, though you wouldn’t know it because as Juri learns about Ramona’s death, he’s having sex with someone else – and when Maik and his team do arrive to search the warehouse, Juri flees, running into the woods and losing the police who were chasing him. Juri runs all the way to a storage garage where he breaks into one of the lockers. Maik later finds a cabin in the woods and he finds a saxophone there, which he takes and keeps in his car. (When Annalena sees the instrument in his car, Maik lies and says it’s his daughter’s. Why is Maik so cagey about the ownership of a woodwind? Also, did you know saxophones are woodwinds and not brass instruments? It’s true. We’re all learning so much today!)

Meanwhile Annalena is tasked with going to Ramona’s house to tell Ramona’s mother that she’s dead. When she arrives, a young boy of no more than 5 or 6 is home alone. Dustin, Ramona’s brother, has been sitting alone waiting for his sister to come home to make him dinner, their mother is nowhere to be found. Annalena makes the boy a sandwich and pokes around the house until the mom comes back. She arrives with Officer Pötschke, who has already informed her of the death. The woman is strung out and emotional wreck, and the officer is not happy to see Annalena there, and he encourages her to scram. When Annalena goes back the next day, a child protective services worker who is there to check on Dustin informs her that Ramona had been planning to sue her mother for custody of Dustin when she turned 18 because the mother never took care of him.

At the police station, Kotzian, Juri’s colleague over at the meth lab, tells Maik that Juri and Ramona were in the middle of a fight and Juri had been violent with her. This tip helps lead the police to Juri, but when they find him hiding in an abandoned building, he jumps from the roof. There goes that lead! But something tells me Juri’s not the last suspect – or dead body – we’ll come across during this investigation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Murder In The Coalfield fits in well with many of the “who killed that teenage girl?” murder mystery shows. Thanks to the traumatic and mysterious backstories of its main characters, and the everyone-is-connected-in-weird-ways small-town vibes, it’s very reminiscent of Mare of Easttown, Top Of The Lake, and Broadchurch.

Our Take: While the detectives are busy trying to sort out who is responsible for Ramona’s death, there is so much more to the show than simply the whodunnit. Maik’s connection to his hometown runs deep, and his personal connections are clearly going to become a major player in this investigation. His daughter, Jackie (Ella Lee), claims not to have been friends with Ramona, but in flashbacks, we see the two hanging out, smoking pot together. And the relationship between Officer Pötschke and Ramona’s mother is still something of a mystery, too – why is he so protective if this deadbeat junkie? And throughout the first episode, a man in a hood continues to show up at the crime scene and then at Maik’s house – who is he and what is his connection to all of this?

Like any good mystery, the show isn’t revealing much early on, we’ll learn the significance of these details eventually. But it’s a strong opening, and we’re already hooked.

Sex and Skin: When Juri learns that his girlfriend Ramona is dead, he is taking a trip to pound-town with another young woman.

Parting Shot: Juri’s head, bloodied, pressed against the ground after he jumped. A hand, perhaps Annalena’s, takes a pulse on his neck, but we all know he’s a goner.

Sleeper Star: Odine Johne is great as the down-to-business detective Annalena Gottknecht. It’s clear that she takes her job very seriously and isn’t in town to make friends, but she also has a soft spot for children. Her scenes with Ramona’s brother, Dustin, give her a chance to play into that tenderness and show a very different type of person than when she’s dealing with her colleagues.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Could you please fasten your set belt?” Annalena asks Maik as they drive away from the crime scene. See, she’s the uptight one who plays by the rules and Maik says, “What rules, baby?!”

Our Call: STREAM IT! The first episode alone is filled with so many small hints and so much suspicious activity, so if you’re a fan of shows that let you play along and try to figure out who did what and why, Murder In The Coalfield is going to be a fun ride (if you’ll allow me to describe something so grim as “fun,” that is).

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.