Three characters — a girl, a killer, and a cop — randomly intersect at a roadside bar and commence a dangerous autobahn journey in Peter Pewas’ Viele kamen vorbei (US: Many Passed By). Loosely based on a real serial killer, Reschke (Harald Maresch), who can’t stop himself from strangling young women while making love to them, stumbles into a bar after dispatching his latest victim on the side of the highway; desperate to flee, he stows away in the trailer of a semi-truck transporting hitchhiker 16-year-old Sabine (Frances Martin) who is running away to be with her boyfriend. After discovering the unwelcome guest, who claims to be ill, the driver and Sabine allow Reschke to sit up front where he and Sabine quickly develop a mutual attraction (Sabine will be saved by her fear of sex). Heinz Schimmelpfennig plays Inspector Morath, who, having seen the girl at the bar before she departed, believes she’s the next victim, so he doggedly searches. While some may find the final sequence a bit too tidy, we watch the events unfold through each of the three main characters’ perspectives, about one third of the film for each, which helps develop each as a three-dimensional human being. The pastoral German scenery — cozy mountains, evergreen forests, misty lakes, sunrises through the passenger window — and Sandloff’s dissonant score (some sections clearly inspired by Stravinsky) establish a world that’s both romantic and unsettling, while classic noir shots appear on a regular basis: the swinging lamp while police question the station attendant, the long shot down the police station hallway where Sabine’s parents have just inspected a corpse, the killer’s observation of Sabine through a chain link partition lining her restaurant booth.