Murder Mindfully

Jan Markus Linhof's Murder Mindfully (Achtsam morden) launched on Netflix in May 2024 as one of the platform's flagship German-language original productions. Adapted from Karsten Dusse's 2019 bestselling novel of the same name (Dusse's series of mindfulness-themed crime novels has continued to expand across multiple titles) the series consolidated Tom Schilling, after his earlier work in Generation War and the Babylon Berlin ensemble, as one of the most internationally significant German leading actors of his generation.

Björn Diemel (Tom Schilling), a burned-out Berlin lawyer working for a low-tier crime boss, takes a mindfulness course to save his marriage to his pregnant wife Katharina (Anna Maria Mühe). Across the course's eight-week structure he begins to apply the techniques to his daily professional environment, and quickly discovers that mindfulness practice works surprisingly well for crisis management in his particular line of work. Emily Kusche plays his daughter; Murathan Muslu plays his crime-boss client Dragan.

The series operates as black-comic crime drama with substantial integration of the actual mindfulness-practice content from Dusse's source novel. The structural commitment to the mindfulness-coaching frame (Schilling's central performance includes substantial yoga, breath-work, and meditation sequences) produced one of the most distinctive recent works of European prestige-comic-drama.