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TATTOO
Rating: 
Germany. 2002.
Director/Screenplay – Robert Schwentke, Producers – Jan Hinter & Roman Kuhn, Photography – Jan Fehnse, Music – Martin Todsharow, Special Effects – Colon FX (Supervisor – Wolf Schiebel), Makeup Effects – Magicmove GmBh, Production Design – Josef Sanktjohanser, Tattoos – Gabriel Bur. Production Company – Studio Canal Filmproduktion/Lounge Entertainment/B.A. Produktion.
Cast:
August Diehl (Marc Schrader), Christian Redl (Chief Inspector Minks), Nadeshda Brennicke (Maya Kroner), Ilknur Bahadir (Mettem), Johan Leysen (Frank Schoubya), Ingo Naujoks (Stefan Kreiner), Jasmin Schwiers (Marie Minks), Joe Bausch (Norbert Günzel)
Plot: Young police detective Marc Schrader is forcibly recruited to the homicide team of Chief Inspector Minks after being caught by Minks at a rave with drugs in his jacket. Their first investigation is the case of a girl whose body has been found incinerated after being hit by a bus. She is found to have bitten a man’s finger off and the finger’s prints belong to a convicted child molester. Further investigation reveals that the dead woman had a tattoo cut from her body. The investigation leads Minks and Schrader into a deepening mystery concerning a blackmarket trade by speciality art dealers who are trying to collect the 12 rare tattoos of the Japanese master tattooist Hiromistu, where the wearers of the tattoos are being killed when they refuse to sell their skin.
Tattoo – no relation to the interesting Bruce Dern-Maud Adams study in obsession also entitled Tattoo (1981) – is a German psycho-thriller. In international release, it drew obvious comparisons and dismissals as trying to be another Se7en (1995). Although beyond some obvious similarities, these dismissals are somewhat unfair – Tattoo has a sufficient degree of originality of its own not to seem derivative. Besides, though it starts out appearing as such, it ends up not being a serial killer thriller at all.
Director Robert Schwentke gets the essential compulsiveness of the genre’s atmosphere down. Although, while Se7en gave the impression it was taking place in a dirty room lit by a dim bulb, Tattoo seems more like it is taking place at midnight on a dreary German train platform. Schwentke gives us slightly washed-out photography and an ambient score that adds much. Although in the end, Tattoo is not quite as stylized a film or caught up in the artistry of the imagery as Se7en was. (Although there is one excellent shot that Schwentke gives us where Nadeshda Brennicke steps back into the rain and as her white dress becomes soaked we gradually begin to see the tattoo underneath). Schwentke is instead merely content conveying a good, gripping policier with a darkly haunted central character. There’s a commendable degree of grisly detail – bodies charred and carved up on a morgue table, tattoos severed from their owner’s skins, two different occasions with people blowing their heads off with a gun, and a particularly attention-grabbing opening where a naked, bloodied woman stumbles along a road before being creamed by a bus that suddenly appears out of the side of the screen. The film gets all the obsessive characterization down, with Christian Redl giving a particularly fine, hard-headed performance, one where you can literally see the haunted pain in his eyes. The plot gets in there too with some compulsive narrative twists. The artistry that goes into the tattoos we see is exceptional.
Tattoo was the directorial debut of German director Robert Schwentke. Schwentke next went onto make the cancer black comedy The Family Jewels (2003), before being brought to the US to make the mainstream thriller Flightplan (2005) with Jodie Foster and the time travel romance The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009).
(Winner for Best Supporting Actor (Christian Redl) at this site’s Best of 2002 Awards).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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