Chris Todd

Tattoo is a clever German thriller that plays like a Warren Ellis screenplay for Basic Instinct filmed in Germany by the resurrected corpse of Alfred Hitchcock. The plot is convoluted, but the premise is relatively straightforward: Marc is a young, hip cop preparing to enter the Berlin police force and looking forward to a cushy desk job as a computer jockey until he's more or less blackmailed into partnering with a veteran officer, Minks, to solve a series of grisly crimes. Not exactly novel -- see Seven, which this movie shares quite a bit of DNA with -- but there are more than a few wrinkles that keep the proceedings interesting. For one, Marc's experience with underground clubbing and the body mod scene proves to be integral to the plot -- it seems someone is stealing rare body art while the canvases are still, well, alive. For another, the direction is super-slick and the orchestral techno soundtrack really works to accentuate the overall mood. Despite the gory exploitation flick you might expect from the set-up, there's almost an underwater, dreamy quality to the film, accentuated by various red herrings, coincidences, mistaken identities, twists, and double-crosses that function not only as Hitchcock homages (Kim Novak look-alike: check) but also a form of inexorable dream logic.

Seven is probably the superior movie in terms of its hermetic, claustrophobic atmosphere; director David Fincher really defined a whole new aesthetic with that film that has been copied many times since, while Tattoo would rather pull from the glossier look of the burnished Hollywood thrillers of John McTiernan and the like. And the movie is not without problems, particularly a bit of deus ex machina half-way through that nearly derails the film, but by that point I was enjoying myself so much that I let it slide. I was glad that I did, too, because while Seven might be the better film, I enjoyed Tattoo a lot more. It's not that Tattoo is any less dark than Seven -- there's at least one twist that attempts to give Seven a run for its money -- but that it almost gleefully plays with audience expectations. Not to give anything away, but if you don't get a chuckle from the opening credits then you should probably just stop the movie right there and move on to something else.

The movie is the writing and directing debut of Robert Schwentke, who apparently made his bones writing a German crime series from 1998-2001 called "Tatort." In an amusing coincidence, Christa (an Austrian friend, you'll see her mentioned from time to time) just mentioned that show to me a few weeks earlier -- sort of the German answer to "Prime Suspect" from what I gathered. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, an English subtitled version of "Tatort" was shown on public television in a few US cities under the name "Scene of the Crime," but neither that version nor the original has been released on DVD anywhere that I can locate, and no sign of either online.

Luckily, there is an English subtitled DVD of Tattoo available, an R2 PAL version from the UK and an R3 NTSC version from Korea. Both are identical prints with the exact same extras, so which one you get purely depends on whether you prefer PAL or NTSC. If you opt for the NTSC version, I highly recommend ordering from DDDHouse -- I can't speak for anyone else, but I've had nothing but good experiences with them. The disc will run you around $12USD with shipping from DDDHouse depending on exchange rate, so the price is pretty hard to beat as well (remember that $1USD equals roughly $8HKD). Of course, you can also order from HKFlix if you prefer a domestic shop.

The soundtrack can only be purchased used from Amazon.de through their Amazon Marketplace; the disc itself is cheap, but the price for international shipping quoted by several of the stores is prohibitive for a single CD. I'll wait and see if I can find some other method of obtaining it.

Schwentke has since made his American debut as the director of the Jodie Foster thriller Flightplan, but I'm hoping for a follow-up to Tattoo someday. There's an interesting, last little twist during the closing credits that could be spun in any number of different ways for a sequel. Myself, I like to think it's the start of the hunt.