This review is based on the German OV of the series.
The true story of the Acid Killer murders really lends itself to a dramatic adaptation, and when it comes to the cinematography and overall story-telling, the series does a lot of things very well. Even the acting is great if you can over the constant plainly audible flaw that ruins the the show for me in its German original version: the lifeless and utterly stilted dialogue.
In my experience German television writers have a well established track-record of coming up with truly cringeworthy verbal interaction that completely destroys any sense of immersion and the viewers ability to empathise with characters. They simply appear fake. They produce these word constructs that, of course, make sense and may even be entirely appropriate in the situation they are uttered in. But they have no realness to them. They seem like bad simulations of what a real human being would say in the same situation, entirely lacking authenticity and … soul. A prime example of this sort of writing are a majority of the episodes of the long-running German crime series "Tatort". And ironically the writers of Gefesselt have long been involved in Tatort and other domestic "cringe-dialogue heavy" shows.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Thus, unfortunately, all that holds true for this series as well. No true feeling is being transported; instead, most of the dialogue feels like a constant mixture of German platitudes, and text-book phrases, that no native speaker would actually use in the given situations. It gives the whole show an eery vibe of a dramatic reading, instead of true acting, that just ruins it for me, despite everything it gets right otherwise.
Review by JanVIP 3BlockedParent2023-02-18T10:58:27Z
This review is based on the German OV of the series.
The true story of the Acid Killer murders really lends itself to a dramatic adaptation, and when it comes to the cinematography and overall story-telling, the series does a lot of things very well. Even the acting is great if you can over the constant plainly audible flaw that ruins the the show for me in its German original version: the lifeless and utterly stilted dialogue.
In my experience German television writers have a well established track-record of coming up with truly cringeworthy verbal interaction that completely destroys any sense of immersion and the viewers ability to empathise with characters. They simply appear fake. They produce these word constructs that, of course, make sense and may even be entirely appropriate in the situation they are uttered in. But they have no realness to them. They seem like bad simulations of what a real human being would say in the same situation, entirely lacking authenticity and … soul. A prime example of this sort of writing are a majority of the episodes of the long-running German crime series "Tatort". And ironically the writers of Gefesselt have long been involved in Tatort and other domestic "cringe-dialogue heavy" shows.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Thus, unfortunately, all that holds true for this series as well. No true feeling is being transported; instead, most of the dialogue feels like a constant mixture of German platitudes, and text-book phrases, that no native speaker would actually use in the given situations. It gives the whole show an eery vibe of a dramatic reading, instead of true acting, that just ruins it for me, despite everything it gets right otherwise.