It always has a slightly sour aftertaste when a fictional story is spun from a real catastrophe for entertainment purposes, as was the case with “The Second Wave”. The flashbacks to Thailand, when a tsunami turned the so-called holiday paradise of Khao Lak into a mass grave at Christmas 2004, are difficult to bear – also because the technical implementation was not that good. It may not be possible to recreate such a force of nature.
What follows, however, is quite exciting: 15 years later, lawyer Harry’s sister-in-law (once again fantastic: Johann von Bülow), whom everyone had thought dead, suddenly appears. Alexandra (Karoline Schuch) is deranged and angry, and the more she learns, the more everything gets out of hand. Schuch plays the conflict of this damaged woman with a force that is sometimes difficult to bear. In addition to the various traumas caused by the tsunami, there is a complicated construct of lies and deceit in which half a dozen other people are also involved. The ensemble makes the somewhat predictable drama worth watching, you suffer with the characters, who all have different burdens to bear – and the ending is not too forgiving, which is not necessary even at Christmas time. (ZDF)