Perhaps more
of a detective thriller than a horror film, Tattoo is an extremely dark,
urban chiller, set in Berlin Germany. August Diehl plays a young
rookie cop named Marc Shrader, who is blackmailed into joining the homicide squad
by a senior detective named Minks (Christian Rehdl), who feels he needs some younger
blood on his team to help him with his latest case.
The body of a woman from a road traffic accident has been brought in, but they are suspicious about the actual cause of death as she was missing 2 large portions of flesh from her back, which appear to have been surgically removed. A look through police records reveals this is not the first suspicious death, where the victim has been missing chunks of flesh from their body, and so the hunt is on for a serial killer.
Their search leads them into the bizarre world of tattoo collectors, who acquire pieces of tattooed skin from the deceased and display them off like works of art. It seems that one such collector has been acquiring their works of art from people who are still alive and not worrying too much about their consent before removing them.
The investigation seems to come to an end when their chief suspect is killed, but after the discovery of another victim, one which was close to detective Minks, it seems that the real killer is still at large and now playing a deadly cat and mouse game with the 2 detectives.
Similar in style to "Seven" and "Silence of the Lambs", this is a very stylish German chiller and certainly much better than a lot of the sanitised mainstream pictures currently being churned out of Hollywood. The only minor problem is that, being made originally for the German market, the film is in its original German language with English sub-titles, so you really need to pay attention to understand what's going on. But then again if this picture were to be dubbed into English I feel it would loose it's dark moody atmosphere.
Definitely one for those who enjoy psychological drama's.
