When Jasmin Grass (Kim Riedle) is kidnapped in a parking garage in the German thriller series Dear Child, she finds herself locked in a small windowless apartment in the middle of a northern German forest. Her abductor — whose face we never see — dyes her dark hair blonde and calls her “Lena.” From that moment on, she’s forced to live according to his strict rules and look after “their” young children, Hannah (Naila Schuberth) and Jonathan (Sammy Schrein). After five months, Lena manages to flee from her prison in a desperate and harrowing escape — but soon realizes she can’t hide from her perpetrator.

Based on Romy Hausmann’s bestselling German novel of the same title (Liebes Kind), the riveting six-episode series Dear Child follows the story of Jasmin/Lena and the children, revealing how an unsolved missing persons case finally unfolds after 13 long years.

Learn more about star Kim Riedle and her role as Lena for Dear Child in this interview with Tudum.

Who is the killer in Dear Child? 

As it turns out, the man who masters the locks is also the key to all the mysteries that converge in Dear Child. The faceless man we meet in the beginning –– the man who orders Jasmin not to cry as he denies her food, the one who always seems to know where everyone is and what they are doing –– is none other than Lars Rogner (Christian Beermann), owner of a local surveillance and security company. He’s been living in plain sight all the 13 years that CID investigator Gerd Bühling (Hans Löw) has been searching for Lena Beck.

Soon after a police officer Aida Kurt (Haley Louise Jones) arrives on the scene where Episode 1’s hit-and-run occurs, she discovers bodies of women who all bore similarities to Lena/Jasmin — all buried close to the scene of the accident and a nearby military base. Aida and her colleagues begin investigating lapses in surveillance and questioning employees of the company monitoring the base and its surroundings, but they fail to question one: the owner of the company himself. 

When Aida goes to the company headquarters in Episode 6 to check on whether they ever had a contract with Lena Beck’s family, she discovers a security system at the Beck household. The last call was around 13 years ago, which is of course the same amount of time that Lena Beck has been missing. In a flashback, we see Lena Beck — the real Lena (Jeanne Goursaud) — accidentally triggering the alarm system after locking herself out while her parents are away. Lars arrives to unlock the house, and she’s so grateful she invites him in for an ice cream afterward. 

Lena Beck was pregnant with an ex-boyfriend’s child — Hannah — when he kidnapped her, but Jonathan is Lars and Lena’s child. Lena gives birth to a third child in captivity, but both she and newborn Sara have childbed fever, a postpartum infection, and when Lars refuses to get a doctor, they both die — as does every “Lena” after her.

What happens at the end of Dear Child?

After recovering from her accident, Jasmin, in the throes of PTSD and suicidal, attempts to end her life before deciding instead to go back to living as Lena. She returns to her abductor in the finale episode, but Lars watches her hide a kitchen knife via a security camera. A disarmingly unfazed Hannah’s right there beside him — he took her from her maternal grandparents, the Becks, overnight. Meanwhile, Jonathan is living in a clinic for children dealing with psychological trauma. 

And no wonder: In flashbacks, we see Jasmin using Jonathan’s treasured snow globe to hit Lars on the head — giving her time to make her escape in Episode 1. Hannah runs after her and witnesses Lena getting hit by a car, but she insists that wounded but alive Lars call an ambulance, because she wants to “keep this mommy.” 

In Episode 6, she’s reunited with both “parents,” while Gerd, the investigator, begins to realize he may finally be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together behind who Lena is. Before they go “home” (aka the windowless prison in the woods), Hannah begs her father to take them to the seaside. Jasmin needs a bathroom break and Lars walks her out onto the shore, removing the knives he knows she’s hidden in her sleeve. What he doesn’t know is that Jasmin has a shard of glass from the shattered snow globe that she’d tucked into a maxi pad inside her underwear. 

Dramatically, Jasmin passes out — or so it seems. Lars turns around and rushes to rouse her, but when he reaches her, Jasmin bolts upright and jams the glass deep in his neck. “I’m not pregnant,” she seethes. “I’m not Lena!” And as she buries the shard in his neck again, she says, “I’m Jasmin!” 

While Hannah and Jasmin walk along the water’s edge, Lars bleeds out near the dunes, and Gerd’s colleagues go through the many bodies buried near the military base only to discover that none are the real Lena Beck. Before dying, Lars confesses that Lena’s body — along with her newborn, Sara — are “in the garden.” At the series’ end, Gerd is packing up his case files, Jasmin is living on her own again, Jonathan is still in the care of the clinic, and Hannah is meeting with a therapist, and the Becks have joined a support group. They’ve reburied Lena at home. “She is with us,” her father (Justus von Dohnányi) says. 

With such a traumatic story at stake, co-directors and co-writers Isabel Kleefeld and and Julian Pörksen gave a special children’s script to Schuberth and Schrein, who play Hannah and Jonathan, which the adult actors also used for their scenes with the kids. “So that you have two realities at the same time,” Pörksen told Netflix’s Die Woche. “As is often the case, especially between children and adults.” In the children’s script Kleefeld wrote, the perpetrator is not psychopathic, but simply an overly worried father. “Someone who is afraid that someone will get hurt,” Kleefeld said. “That’s why he doesn’t let anyone out… Of course this is all exaggerated of [the dad].” 

As Pörksen told Netflix: “Basically, all the characters are collateral damage of the crime. They are all victims, in one way or another. And we wanted to tell their stories.”

Stream all six episodes of Dear Child here. 

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