Because her boss is out of town, private detective Sam's (Armin
Mueller-Stahl) secretary Anna (Birgit Doll) takes it upon herself to
investigate the disappearance of industrialist wife Maria from her seaside villa shortly
after her kid had died in an accident. However, the case soon seems to get
to Anna's head, and even though she claims she has never been to the sea,
she starts having weird and traumatic seaside memories ... and more and
more, she starts to assume the personality of Maria, who according to the
villagers has most likely committed suicide. Ultimately, she even tries to
get intimate with the missing woman's lover Jean (Lou Castel) ... Meanwhile,
Sam has returned to his office and gets some threatening phonecalls about
his secretary's work, along with her mother's (Hanne Wieder) rather
disquieting story about a childhood trauma of Anna's: Turns out as a kid
she has indeed been to the sea, and she has lost her younger sister just
the way Maria has lost her daughter. With the help of Jean, Sam manages
to track her down, but he's almost too late, because the neighbour's
jealous daughter (Janna Marangosoff), who was Maria's best friend and has witnessed Maria's
death (she has indeed killed herself) first hand, is now desperately trying to drive her to suicide ... The
premise of this film might not be entirely new, but the story of a woman
losing herself in a case she's supposed to solve is at least original ...
the movie though is less so, it comes across as very far-fetched,
unnecessarily convoluted, and offers little new in terms of direction - as
a matter of fact, the directorial effort of this film is functional at
best and never even tries to create some creepy atmosphere or anything
like that. At least the acting's pretty good, and everybody seems to be
more than able to fight his/her way through stilted dialogue, so to not
make this film a total loss, but still, that's not enough reason to really
watch Trauma.
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