Last week, my housemate knocks on the door of Swiss Me Deadly HQ, aka my office.

“Hey,” he says, “you’re researching heroin in Switzerland, right? Have you ever seen Strähl? It’s a cult crime movie about a bent drugs cop. Magsch mitluege?”

“Heroin, you say?” I reply. “A weird Swiss genre movie, you say?! Just tell me it features some places I’ve been to, but with dated fashion….”

“Züri Langstrasse ca. 2004 okay?”

So we watch it.

Strähl was made the early 2000s and boy, you soon know it: shakicam, fast cuts, happenin’ music and funky zooms. I was reminded of the first series of the French cop show Engrenages (Spiral in English); my housemate kept thinking of Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run); and some of the comedy bits and intersecting plots had a touch of the Guy Ritchie gangster movies. I’m sure someone with a better knowledge of the genre would tell me the Hollywood origins of all this… Maybe NYPD Blue?

Anyway, the story is comparable to the Sunday night Tatort, though apparently it was gritty and unusual for Switzerland at the time. Strähl is a narc trying to break an Albanian drug boss, without much success. He goes too far when a “fixer”, i.e. a junkie, ends up with a broken wrist, and files a complaint against him. The twist is that the cop himself is also an addict, stuck on painkillers. He’s permanently wound up – a standard “loose cannon” scenario – and the cops, junkies, and dealers who get sucked into his downward spiral had better watch out.

In terms of screenplay, the plot is tight and, though the characters are sometimes bogged down with naff dialogue and stereotyping, there are some good jokes. A couple of the story turns are satisfyingly unexpected, though for my money they mess up the ending. It has a couple of good performances, especially by the lead actor Roeland Wiesnekker; the “comedy sidekick” role played by Mike Müller was also very funny. For anyone who’s hung around Zürich’s Langstrasse from time to time, it’s an entertainingly local, almost soapy bit of fun.

As a Swiss German heroin movie, Strähl is more fluffy than the other things we’ve seen so far, but it seems well researched. For example, this little explainer by the excellent Filmo (DE) says that the blue light in the junkie scenes was typical for the era, as business and residences in the area had the habit of putting up UV lights so the junkies couldn’t see their veins. The Albanian dealers are mostly rather cringy stereotypes, but that ethnicity does come up quite a lot in the stuff I’ve been reading.  In addition, it was very fun to see heroin policy pioneer Andre Seidenberg get a cameo role, in his own office no less (he was advising them about the drug scenes). I used Andre Seidenberg quite a lot in my explainer for Platzspitzbaby.

Strähl was a debut movie, made by a director as part of his finishing project for film school, and it ended up with acting awards and the Swiss Film Prize for its two leads. I reckon that if you have connection to the local area, and don’t go in with too high expectations, you can knock on your housemate’s door in good conscience, and ask them if they fancy a beer and a bit of fun with that “cult crime movie about a bent drugs cop in Zurich”.

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Swissness Difficulty Level: Chasseral (easy).
Language: Swiss German.
Availability: PlaySuisse.