“Look into the Kastl”: Sunday’s “Tatort” (ARD, 8:15 p.m.) invites you to the Zurich Zoo

On a full moon night, the Zurich Zoo becomes a “crime scene” (yesterday, ARD), the first – and not the only – murder victim is a chimpanzee. A case for the police? “We are not Four Paws here,” the public prosecutor rejects human rights for great apes, which Commissioner Tessa Ott (Carol Schuler) sees differently.
With her colleague Isabelle Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher), she hurries, completely exhausted, through this confusing case, which seems to be bathed in pale moonlight. The boundaries between serious and exaggerated, real and surreal blur attractively.
The motive for the crime is all the more glaring: “Greed triggered everything,” Ott recognizes. Even a commissioner is not immune to temptation. It’s about money laundering, involving those who most conspicuously cloak themselves in sustained innocence and obtain donations for the new “Congo Monkey Forest” in the zoo. Its inhabitants are not meant when it says – accompanied by the soundtrack of quiet monkey cries – “Caged up greedy monkeys, that’s what we are as humans.”