In Dear Child, a 13-year-old missing persons case is reopened with stunning and dramatic turns. When an unknown woman is struck by a car in a German forest at night, doctors and nurses at the ER have plenty of questions. And then, once they start talking to the precocious and strange little girl who accompanies her in the ambulance, the mystery grows deeper — and more urgent.
Based on the international bestselling novel of the same title, Dear Child (original German title Liebes Kind) unspools its suspenseful story across six episodes. It’s as tense as Gone Girl, while the claustrophobic, dungeon-like scenario that the little girl (Naila Schuberth) describes back home recalls Room. In Dear Child, all the twisting roads and plots appear to point back to that dark forest — or do they?
Stream all six episodes here.
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Co-writer and co-director Julian Pörksen told Netflix’s Die Woche, “These are all damaged characters: people who are severely scarred by a crime and deal with it very differently. The perpetrator is often the focus of such series and is glorified as a mysterious, dark force. That's not the case with us. And there is a main character who is extraordinary in every way. A girl who has a special view of the world, a special way of speaking, thinking and experiencing.”
Trapped in a windowless house, Lena (Kim Riedle), 12-year-old Hannah (Naila Schuberth), and 8-year-old Jonathan (Sammy Schrein) are isolated from the outside world. Their days and nights are ruled by a strict schedule, with food meted out by the children’s father. Whenever he enters their prison of a room, all three of them must line up and hold out their hands to prove they have nothing to hide. He dictates, and they obey.
That is, until the night Lena finally manages to escape, wearing only a nightgown. She doesn’t get far: A hit-and-run accident leaves her badly injured. As she’s rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, she’s accompanied by Hannah, who’s unscathed but beginning to reveal some disturbing, fragmented glimpses of their life back home. The nurses alert the police — and suddenly another investigator of a 13-year-old missing persons case is ready to open the files again. What happened to Lena Beck all those years ago? Has she been at her kidnapper’s mercy this whole time?
As co-producer Friederich Oetker told Netflix: “I found the motif of the inner and outer prison particularly interesting: Even if you manage to escape, you take your inner prison with you. You have to free yourself from it.” Added co-producer Tom Spiess, “All the characters narrate with their inner voice, so to speak — from their inner prison, while the perspective changes. And we found the theme relevant: It is about family.”
“Dear Child is different in that the story is told from the victim's perspective, never from the perpetrator's perspective,” director and head writer Isabel Kleefeld said in an interview with Die Woche. “That was also something special about the novel, which had a great attraction for us.”
(Want to know what happens at the end? Check out this Ending Explainer to find out, but beware, spoilers abound!)
Yes, it’s an adaptation of the international bestselling novel Dear Child (original title Liebes Kind) by German author Romy Hausmann. Director and head writer Isabel Kleefeld told Netflix: “I read the book in one night and saw the whole story very vividly in my mind. The material fascinated me immediately. Dear Child is told from the point of view of each of the participants, and the perspective changes again and again. The result is an exciting game with reality, a puzzle that the audience can always add to and reassemble. It is the story of a crime that has many victims, directly or indirectly.”
“How do you tell this story — the many layers of the book — as a series?” Pörksen said. “What do you have to change, rewrite? Because Dear Child draws its tension from different, very subjective perspectives. The thrill results from the question whose perception you can trust.”
As Hausmann told Netflix about seeing her story adapted into a series, “I hope my readers feel like I did: There will be many things that are familiar from the book, and at the same time it will feel totally new. There also is, for example, a new character (Aida Kurt), who really excited me because she lives the complete opposite of the perpetrator’s imagination. It’s subtle and incredibly well told. Why didn’t I think of that?”
For more on the book, check out this interview with author Romy Hausmann in Netflix’s Queue.
No, it’s entirely fictional. In another interview, Hausmann described how she writes without knowing what will happen next: “Even if no one believes me, I don’t plot... I just set up the initial premise and try to create the characters as defined as possible. Then I start to write, asking myself again and again how this character should behave next, what is realistic, and above all: How would I behave in this situation?”
The series is set in Germany, where most of the filming also took place. “The production office was only a five-minute walk from my flat,” said Spiess. “Adjacent to it is a smaller industrial complex where they used to produce cigarettes and then medicinal products. That’s where our dungeon was built, for example. We always wanted to shoot where most of the team members live and where we have the most experience. And that is Cologne and the surrounding area — in other words, North Rhine-Westphalia in the broadest sense.” Added Oetker: “We filmed in Wuppertal, by the sea in Belgium, and we were also in Remscheid and Bonn.”
Two-time Academy Award winner Gustavo Santaolalla wrote the soundtrack for Dear Child. The Argentine composer is a frequent collaborator of Alejandro González Iñárritu. Last year, he scored the dark comedy The House. For the sound of Dear Child, Santaolalla aimed to capture the light and shade of the story. In an interview with Die Woche, he said, “It is very violent and has hard and rough moments, but at the same time there is something very fragile about it. People are on the edge, on the verge of breaking. There were great opportunities to try out different things. For example the mix of electronic and acoustic music. Dear Child was perfect for that.”
Want to hear the Dear Child (Liebes Kind) soundtrack? Check it out on Spotify!
