Murder Mindfully, two seemingly opposite words strung together, makes for a good TV story. At one end, there is a murder; at the other, there is mindfulness—a sense of calm one craves but struggles for it. And in this 2024 German dark-comedy Netflix series, one would have to go so far as to kill people to stay mindful and calm. Murder Mindfully is one such series that keeps you entertained throughout the end.
The twenty-first century is puzzling for many. There are too many things happening all through. At the start of the century, the internet was born, and today, the internet, virtual reality, and everything else in between is a reality.
Everyone has a mobile phone, and there is the internet on it. And everyone else knows everything today. Thanks to Google. Or, say, ChatGPT. Capitalism is on the rise. Wars and genocide, a new normal. The coronavirus kills too many. And the new Trump era. All this may seem like everything, everywhere, all at once.
This is precisely what Byung-Chul Han’s 2015 book “The Burnout Society” allowed us to grasp about our times: pathological exhaustion.
Well, the series Murder Mindfully itself does not engage with the themes of exhaustion in toto, but its aftereffects. What does exhaustion at work do to a person? What happens when a defence lawyer who has lost all balance in his life—no time for family and his child—decides to fix it? Well, obviously, he has to attend mindfulness sessions.
A guru has to teach how to breathe in and out every once in a while, to feel in control. In every other episode, you encounter a semi-bald guy giving a mindful lesson to the lawyer: to keep calm, breathe, observe, listen, and then act.
The series Murder Mindfully begins with a man pushing a cart with a body, avoiding a snail on the ground, narrating: “I am not a violent person. Quite the opposite”. Very soon after that, once the cart halts, the body parts flow out into the furnace.
A few weeks before, the narrator seemed to have had a difficult life. He seemed to have missed his daughter’s birthday and pissed off his wife for not loving her and his daughter enough. But, this narrator turns to mindfulness sessions upon his wife’s insistence.
In fact, the story itself is very straightforward: A lawyer, Bjorn Diemel (Tom Schilling), who has lost his self-esteem almost, his wife Katharina (Emily Cox) almost, and his daughter’s (Pamuk Pilavci) love almost, and respect at his workplace almost, is working with a mafia boss Dragan Sergowicz (Sascha Gersak). But, just as things proceed in the story, the Mafia boss is in trouble for openly burning his opponent’s lieutenant.
So, with his daughter Emily in the car, all excited to spend time with her dad on a beach vacation, the lawyer decides to help his thug client by putting him in a car trunk. After reaching the beach, the lawyer decides to forget to open the trunk to let the mafia boss out, and in the process, kills him. Everything that follows is dealing with cops, mafia goons, opposite cartel bosses, and family time.
Murder Mindfully is masterfully crafted to keep you excited—but also guessing the next moves. Mindfulness is a great theme to draw out elements of sociopathic behaviour in people. It almost feels like the characters are so relatable—so you, at times, that you tend to forget that you would end up doing some of it.
Murder someone if that brings peace to your life. Then, pretend to take control of things as if they were in control. Breathe. This is a recurring theme. Breathe when things seem out of control. By shifting between manipulations and survival strategies, the lawyer had to restructure his entire life: wife happy, daughter rejoiced, workplace satisfied, and all else under control.
Murder Mindfully combines dark humour with psychological thrill. Tom Schilling delivers an outstanding performance as the lead character—and the narrator in the background. It definitely sits with stuff like “Better Call Saul” or “Pulp Fiction” or “Big Lebowski” or even “Dexter”. Murder Mindfully is definitely a binge-worthy series: No wonder I sat from morning to evening and finished all eight episodes.
Watch the series on Netflix.