Based on a mystery novel by Bernd Aichner, Totenfrau follows the mortician Brünhilde Blum (Anna-Maria Mühe), who is married to Mark (Maximilian Kraus), a cool, easygoing police officer. They live with their two kids in a small town outside Innsbruck, where the owners of the local ski resort are the true power. When Mark is killed in a hit-and-run one morning, his fellow cops are weirdly uninterested in pursuing the leads. Blum realizes that her husband was murdered because he was in the process of uncovering terrible secrets. Mark’s death opens up a fissure in Blum’s life. Elliptical flashbacks reveal that she was the adopted child of two morticians who moonlighted as sadists: their favored method of disciplining their daughter was to seal her in a coffin. The young Blum began to hear the corpses in her parents’ morgue speaking to her, offering her soothing counsel.
In Episode 3, the priest says Blum's adopted parents wanted to return her hinting of something darker but he persuaded them not to...