Die tödliche Maria is sober and sometimes even sombre, but with a fair dose of black humour. It is also made with great visual virtuosity and feeling for the bizarre. It is largely set indoors, which makes extra demands on Tykwer and he met them with flying colours. His style is hyper-realistic: he uses extreme characters and he did not tie himself to a specific time or place in the set dressing.The central character is Maria (Nina Petri). She has grown up in a cramped petit-bourgeois environment and even now, as a mature woman, she has still not managed to escape it: she still lives in her parents’ house with her invalid and needy father and with her husband, a younger colleague and card-playing friend of her father’s. Her father is an ungrateful, moody and sick man and her husband is petty, stingy and dis¡trustful. In fact Maria lives as a prisoner. Her way to escape is in her imagination: she writes lengthy letters to herself. She also has a special gift: she can kill with a look. However she never harms anything more than a fly. She does however have a macabre collection of flies killed by her gaze. That gives her a certain rapport with a strange neighbour who spends his spare time compiling an comprehensive bibliography. Her interest in the neighbour goes much further than her stifling surroundings allow and a dramatic turn becomes inevitable.
