Baran bo Odar's "The Silence" (Das Letzte Schweigen, 2010)

This was a great film.  It is part police procedural, but it is also about time, guilt, grief, and the dark crimes of impulse and passion, about the known and the unknown, the knowable and unsuspected, and those things that are never fully known.    Two friends (Peer and Timo)  share an apartment somewhere in Germany,  Timo is an architecture student and the Peer is a groundskeeper in the apartment complex.  They go for a drive in the country and, seeing a young girl on a bicycle turn down a gravel path, the driver impulsively backs up and turns down that path too.  Then in broad daylight in the middle of a wheat field Peer rapes and murders the girl, throws her bike into the field, all while Timo looks on, horrified. 

Nevertheless he does nothing, and later helps his friend dispose of the body in a canal.   Shortly afterwards Timo breaks off the friendship and flees.

Twenty three years go by.  The witness (Timo) is by all accounts a happily married father of two and a successful architect.    And now, weirdly, the same kind of murder takes place on the 23rd anniversary of that earlier murder in much the same way and in exactly the same place.  The previous crime had never been solved, but the similarities quickly draw the attention of the police to the older crime.    The rest of the film is about how the murders were solved or not solved. 

The police detectives are themselves fully delineated characters with their own quirks and personalities.  There is the older detective now retired who tries and fails to solve the older case.  He is still around and pursuing the solution of the current case while in a relationship of sorts with the woman whose daughter disappeared so many years ago. 

The younger detective is an unkempt workaholic who lost his wife shortly before and works partly to distract himself from his own grief.  Apparently he is a cross-dresser as well.  He is on intimate terms with his female partner detective who is clearly a few months pregnant. 

It would be a shame to spoil this one by going any farther than this.  This modern 21st century European world seems so normal, so commonplace, even universal and yet as it turns out, there is a dark side to many things and many people, some of which we will never know.