Newly graduated police officer Marc Schrader (August Diehl) finds himself being blackmailed into working under gritty, seasoned homicide detective Minks (Christian Redl) who recovered the younger man’s police jacket and ID during a raid of a techno club where drugs were being exchanged. Although Schrader applied and was accepted in the photo processing division, Minks thinks Schrader’s street smarts and connections might be useful in helping him find his daughter Marie who ran away when he became too smothering following the hit and run death of his wife. Their first case involves the badly charred corpse of a nude woman who was chased into the path of a bus which exploded after hit another vehicle. They are able to get the killer’s prints as she managed to bite one of his fingers off while he was strangling her. Raiding the killer’s house, they discover in the basement, a preserved piece of skin bearing an ornate Japanese tattoo as well as the buried remains of two other mutilated victims. Maya (Nadeshda Brennicke), a gallery owner friend of the first victim tells Schrader that the tattoo was one of only twelve done by a deceased Japanese artist. An encounter with a junkie who sold one of his tattoos to a collector causes Schrader to look into the business of skin collecting; discovering that the Japanese artist’s work fetches high prices among collectors and that the 12 people who got the tattoos are either missing or dead and that most of their tattoos been won at online auction by the mysterious Irezumi (Japanese for tattoo). When Maya discovers that her friend was killed for her tattoo, she reveals to Schrader that she bears the dead artist’s unknown 13th tattoo – his masterpiece – which means that she may be the next victim.

Though not quite the “darkest chiller since” the overrated SE7EN, TATTOO is clearly modeled after that film complete with the bleak setting (although Jan Fehse’s pleasing scope cinematography has more saturation than Darius Khondji’s ENR-enhanced work on the former film), incriminating prints from a severed body part, a stealthy chase scene, and a gruesome surprise in a box. Although the attraction between Schrader and femme fatale/potential victim Maya seems obligatory and underdeveloped (and Schrader’s girlfriend drops out of the picture entirely after seeing them together and Schrader does not seem to notice), its execution feels organic to the film’s aesthetics. Diehl is quite good in the lead (though the script doesn’t really distinguish his special street smarts from any other of the clubbers who thrash about in slow motion in scenes that seem lifted from Claude Chabrol’s DR. M and suggest that the club scene in Germany hasn’t changed since the eighties) and Brennicke cuts a fine figure but isn’t given much to do. Redl gives the most dimensional performance as the hardboiled cop with the tragic past and, in a nice change, Monica Bleibtreu’s commissioner is initially introduced as a shrieking harridan but turns out to be a sympathetic character. The ending is not surprising and a bit anti-climatic since the discovery of the killer is not based on deduction but on delayed case data from America though most of us will have already guessed the identify of Irezumi. Additionally, Schrader’s fiery confrontation is with a character we have known to be a red herring. Despite this, TATTOO is a nice diversion that speaks well of German-born, American-educated TV writer Schwentke’s abilities as a director.