It can still be seen from the right-hand drive of the car: Ellen Berlinger (Heike Makatsch), recently chief inspector in Freiburg, has spent the last few years in England. Now she has returned to her hometown – but has not yet brought herself to reconnect with her mother. Because Ellen Berlinger has to rush to an assignment on her first day at work, there is no time for training or getting to know her colleagues in detail. You seem to be fine with that. It is enough for her if she gets to know her new boss Volker Gaus (Holger Kunkel), her colleague Henrik Koch (Max Thommes) or forensic technician Frank Hensel at work. Small talk isn't Ellen's thing. The team has to process their astonishment at the new colleague's pregnancy anyway.
The case leads Ellen Berlinger to the benefits department of the job center. Employee Holger Kunath was found there early in the morning at his desk, strangled with a cable tie. His computer monitor shows a suicide note, but is it believable? Ellen Berlinger doubts. Working in the job center is not for sensitive minds, employees are often exposed to aggression or threats from their customers. With Holger Kunath, they mainly related to housing issues. Expensive renovations of inner-city districts and the conversion of rented apartments into owner-occupiers are also crowding out previous tenants in Freiburg, and this includes many job center customers. Fate also threatens Cornelia Mai, who shows up at the job center with her 16-year-old daughter Melinda.
Ms. Mai could be angry with Holger Kunath because her rent was paid through the job center. Ellen Berlinger wonders why Kunath didn't transfer the money, because now the termination will take effect. But Ms. Mai is more sad than angry, resigned, she bunkers in her apartment, Melinda can't change anything about that. When Ellen Berlinger visits Kunath's wife Jutta, she experiences an almost mirror-inverted situation: the Kunath family has overstretched themselves financially with a condominium in a chic Freiburg showcase district. The debt has been growing for a while. Instead of mourning, Mrs. Kunath and her son Titus now have to worry about their apartment. The teenagers around Titus Kunath, Melinda Mai or their friends distract themselves from the family problems in their own way.
Titus' girlfriend Harriet likes the impotence game, which the youngsters call the passout game or bio-pot, and enjoys the short, exciting intoxication caused by pushing away the oxygen in the brain. Melinda makes no secret of the fact that, unlike her friend Ruth, she doesn't believe in the game. Instead, she is interested in Titus, who probably didn't think too much of his father. In fact, Holger Kunath turns out to be a man with nasty secrets. He had an affair with at least one of his customers and it is clear to Ellen that someone must have known about it, because there is a photo as evidence, but only Kunath himself can be seen on it. Ellen and her team conclude that Kunath was easy to pressure, which made him interesting to people like Bauinvestor Fest.
He wants to vacate the building where the Mais still live as quickly as possible, using subtle methods such as usurping authority and destroying pipes. With Ellen, on the other hand, he tries to flatter himself. Without success, of course, she doesn't react to rasps of sweetheart. She could have inherited her uncompromising manner from her mother. Because when Ellen finally decides to approach Edelgard Berlinger again, she is unequivocally rejected. Edelgard's aversion to Ellen, who went to the police and left her daughter's care to her grandmother, seems unshakable. 16-year-old Niina, who suspects that Ellen is her unknown mother, would react differently. But Ellen keeps avoiding this encounter.
However, when she finds out that Niina is also friends with Melinda, she realizes that they will possibly have something to do with each other in the course of the investigation... In the "Tatort" special "Five Minutes Heaven" Heike Makatsch shows that she also as "Tatort" commissioner knows how to convince. Her Ellen Berlinger is determined, rather unapproachable and complex, and one suspects that there are some unsolved mysteries in her life. Thomas Wendrich's screenplay leads them into an acute urban conflict area, to the problem of the gentrification of inner-city districts, the victims of which are not least the recipients of social benefits. Director Katrin Gebbe, for whom "Five Minutes of Heaven" is the television film premiere, staged an atmospheric "crime scene" with harmonious milieus in which the images speak most of all.