Walter Presents: ‘Unbroken’ preview – intriguing and engaging

Police commissioner Alex Ender (Aylin Tezel) is heavily pregnant when a routine stop in a supermarket car park has terrible consequences. As she returns to her vehicle, a masked man is waiting for her and drugs her rendering her unconscious. When she wakes up, it’s six days later and she’s in a forest covered in blood. And even more alarmingly, she’s no longer pregnant.

If you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading this article now.

She stumbles barefoot across the woods until she finds a house, where a family are having a child’s birthday party. That kid is going to have a party to remember for all the wrong reasons.

Doctors confirm that her body has been injected with medication used in labour to assist the birth – but there’s no sign of the baby, and Alex says has no recollection of what happened after the carjacking. But not everyone believes her.

Three months later and Alex returns to work, albeit grudgingly. As part of her recovery, she undergoes therapy with Dr Kathrin Brenner (Leslie Malton), but she’s a reluctant patient. The police – her own colleagues, including her boss Paul Nowak (Özgür Karadeniz) – have drawn a blank on finding her child, and the case has gone cold. But Alex won’t give up. When the team, following the murder of a prostitute, raid a flat containing Romanian refugees, Alex stumbles across a baby’s musical toy, and the tune it makes triggers a memory. Was this same toy there when she gave birth?

Suspicions fall on Alex herself, who has admitted to considering having an abortion at the start of her pregnancy. She even said to her husband, Leif, in the days leading up to the kidnapping that other people were more excited about the baby than she was. So, was this an elaborate ruse to rid herself of a child she was not 100% committed to?

Set in Cologne in Germany, this thriller is well worth viewing. Aylin Tezel is excellent in the lead role, playing a woman suspected by some of being involved in her own kidnapping. She was nominated for Best Actress for the role in the 2021 Germany TV Awards. The show itself won Best Cinematography Fiction Award at the same event.

The script is nicely paced, and it’s well acted throughout. Admittedly, there is nothing particularly original or groundbreaking here, but there’s more than enough to engage and grab one’s attention. The storyline in intriguing and engaging.

Perhaps not one to watch if you are pregnant – there are some fairly harrowing scenes that might be upsetting – but if you enjoy a well-written and well-acted mystery, you could do a lot worse.

Walter Presents: ‘Unbroken’ is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.