A writer frames himself for his wife's murder—then she actually vanishes. Games have consequences, darling.
In this mystery/thriller based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Nico Thomkins (Udo Schenk), a writer, and his wife Helen (Anke Sevenich) are in the habit of playing games with one another. Even while they are breaking up, they are sufficiently in tune with one another to continue this practice. When the writer's wife takes off without leaving a note behind, people begin to suspect that he may have murdered her, and he plays along with this notion to the point of planting clues which would incriminate him. Obviously, no one with a shred of common sense would do such a thing, and these tricks get him into trouble. However, his troubles don't really begin until he starts to search for her in earnest.
Acting
Udo Schenk's deliciously unreliable narrator energy
Writing
Highsmith's cruel logic: games become gravity
Director
Rainer Boldt
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Highsmith's novels were rarely adapted in West Germany during her lifetime; this TV movie emerged just two years before her death, when her critical reputation was finally rehabilitating from years of genre snobbery.
The 1989 production captures a very specific late-Cold-War European aesthetic—cramped apartments, moral ambiguity, and the sense that institutional justice is too sluggish to catch sophisticated liars.
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