Netflix ‘Woman of the Dead’ Season 2 Review - Anna Maria Mühe Cannot Save this Bland Crime Drama

There is an article on The Hollywood Reporter India website titled "The Formulaic Future of Indian Streaming." There, you will find this confession from editor Antara Lahiri: "One platform literally told us — We don't care about quality, just deliver the show on time." One could imagine Netflix giving an order like this to most filmmakers who make movies and shows for the streaming service. When cinema becomes content, numbers achieve more priority than craftsmanship. Who cares about stuff like staging and lighting? Just keep generating high viewership data, and the machine will be fine. The second season of Woman of the Dead (aka, Totenfrau) is the result of such shoddy management, such indifference towards quality. Why does it exist? That's the main question that haunts every frame of this new season, which fails to even work as a well-oiled machine. It begins with the discovery of a skeleton that threatens to put Blum (Anna Maria Mühe) in police custody. Blum doesn't want to go to jail - she doesn't want to leave her kids, Nela (Emilia Pieske) and Tim (Lilian Rosskopf). Nela has a boyfriend, Alex (Tristan López), and Tim has diabetes. Does it matter? Nope. Alex belongs to the Schönborn family, and they don't like Blum and her family. Don't expect much drama or friction from this point. The information just exists. Similarly, Tim's diabetes never turns into a serious health emergency. Given how bland Season 2 is, the boy should have given rise to a medical urgency if only to jangle the nerves of the audience superficially.

I praised Anna Maria Mühe's performance when I reviewed the first season of this series in 2023. I cannot make a similar comment here because Season 2 fails to offer the pleasure of watching good acting. Maria Mühe gets to ride her bike in style, which might be the only reason why she agreed to return for this series. We register her presence only because she receives more screen time. Other actors aren't fortunate enough. They slip away from our minds as soon as we move away from the ongoing scene. This means that Nela's kidnapping holds no weight, no urgency. She spends the majority of this second season inside a container, crying and screaming. Our response, though, is as casual as that of Tim's playing video games without worrying about whatever's happening in his home, his surroundings. Season 2, in fact, is made by someone devoid of feelings. The page-to-screen translation is thuddingly literal, dull, and boring. The camera merely films the actors who do nothing more than speak their lines with faux gravity. The Austrian landscape gives Woman of the Dead a scenic beauty, which the series anyway spoils through muddy, impersonal shots that cannot even be labeled as "touristy." Did I tell you that Blum has a love interest this time? He is Reza (Yousef Sweid), her assistant/self-defense teacher/lover/whatever, and he...well, he, um, helps Blum and takes care of the kids? Please put your hands together for Reza, the strong nanny.

If you haven't guessed it yet, Season 2 is a failure on multiple levels. One of the primary reasons for this decline is the glaring absence of formidable villains. Sabine Timoteo's Tamar, with her cold countenance, looks promising enough, but Season 2 wastes her potential. This shouldn't come as a surprise in a season that seems intent on diminishing the impact of its predecessor. There was a certain joy in watching Maria Mühe's widow "not doing the usual mourning routine" in Season 1. She exuded charm as well as self-assurance and carried the show on her shoulders. Blum curiously doesn't look the same in the second season. Or is it possible that I have forgotten what Blum looked like in Season 1? But I do remember having a good time with those six episodes. These new episodes left me enervated. By the end, I was almost ready to lie in one of Blum's coffins. Woman of the Dead Season 2 sucks the joy out of the audience.

Final Score- [2/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times