Exterritorial (2025) Netflix Review: A PTSD-Fueled Frenzy Inside the American Consulate in Frankfurt

Exterritorial wastes no time throwing trauma in your face. Our lead, Sara Wulf, a former Special Forces soldier who saw her entire unit wiped out in Afghanistan, is now a single mother navigating post-war life with a six-year-old son, Josh.

Claustrophobia, Gaslighting & a Whole Lotta Plot

It opens with a beach scene that’s deceptively peaceful until a helicopter overhead sends Sara into a PTSD spiral. Cue ringing ears, slow-mo, and an aggressive outburst that foreshadows the chaos to come. By the time they arrive at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt to apply for a visa, we know two things: Sara has unprocessed trauma, and Josh is the only tether she has left. When Josh vanishes from the playroom inside the consulate, and no one remembers seeing him, we’re off to the races in what becomes a used mix of Flightplan, Fractured, Die Hard, and those dream-sequence-heavy psychological thrillers from 2004.

Josh and Sara Wulf are at the beach. Josh is about six years old and playing with a bucket. A helicopter flies overhead. Sara hears it, freezes, and spirals. As an opening scene, it’s subtle but clear, a thread the film uses to try and wrap up something thematic at the end. This moment works. It’s also the only time in the whole film it asks us to infer something about her trauma. You guess there’s a history from her time in Afghanistan, and you’d be right.

That small amount of curiosity is barely paid off. The very next beat, Sara’s at the American consulate in Frankfurt with Josh, trying to get a visa. She’s applying for a job in the US, a security role for women veterans, and brings her son with her. While they wait, he runs off to play hide and seek. First, there’s a scare, she can’t find him, but then he pops back up. Then she leaves him in a supervised playroom, and this time he’s actually gone.

And just like that, the thriller kicks off and slams into one of the most overused devices imaginable: the mother insists her child was there, and everyone else insists she came in alone.

Nobody on staff saw him. The cameras don’t show him. The building is under extraterritorial control, so German authorities can’t intervene. She even calls her mother for suppor, and here’s where the screenplay trips over itself. Her mum, Anja, tells her to calm down and vaguely suggests she’s unwell. But then, seconds later, she also says, “What’s happened to Josh?” This is a structural beat completely out of sync with the film’s own premise. It’s like no one rewrote the scene after changing the order.

Sara starts to spiral. She finds Josh’s toy car and becomes sure she’s not imagining it. A security officer, Eric Kynch, and Sergeant Donovan are introduced as officials she should be able to trust, but both brush her off. The more desperate Sara becomes, the more everyone around her ramps up the “you’re mentally unwell” rhetoric. Surveillance footage is wiped, staff say she arrived alone, and eventually they try to escort her out.

Instead, she hides inside the consulate. The film goes full thriller mode from here, keeping things mostly confined to the building’s interiors. While the tone is inconsistent, there’s something effectively eerie about how empty it all feels, the consulate feels both over-secured and under-populated, which adds to the unease.

There’s an Escape Plan in Extraterritorial

Sara runs into Irina, who is later revealed to be Kira Volkova, a Belarusian dissident who’s been detained for nearly two months. She offers to help Sara search for Josh if Sara helps her escape. They form a reluctant duo. At first, Kira doesn’t trust her, she calls Sara a psycho multiple times, but slowly they realise they’re both caught in something bigger.

Sara stumbles on a bag of drugs. She remembers seeing two people exchange bags earlier that day, a memory the film only now shows in flashback. The conspiracy is starting to coalesce, and the audience is fully ahead of the plot.

She gets caught, drugged, and wakes up under medical supervision. The film uses a slow-dream montage to try to deepen her backstory: she had a partner in Afghanistan, Josh’s father, who died in the same ambush that shattered her unit. But at this point, the damage is done. We’ve been watching her crawl across ceilings and break into locked offices, not sit with grief.

Visually, the film starts to flex. The lighting is cold, institutional blue tones coat every room, creating a kind of numbing atmosphere that actually works. The action sequences, while long, have flair. One moment follows a guard being thrown to the ground with the camera tracking the fall. For a few brief minutes, the movie remembers how to direct tension.

Sara and Kira escape with the drugs. Kira helps her get free, but it’s not a rescue, it’s leverage. They still don’t fully trust each other. There’s a scene where Kira gives her a hair tie to wear around her wrist to snap when she’s “losing it,” and yes, the film is 100% serious about it.

From here, they sneak through more corridors and then up onto the roof. It’s ridiculous. They’re still dragging the duffle bag with them. The camera plays it like a Bourne film, but they look like overworked gymnasts on a failed heist.

The man Sara saw exchange bags earlier reappears, he’s in the cafeteria, casually eating lunch. She recognises him in hindsight. This isn’t a twist. It’s her finally catching up with the thing we already knew. He gives her the keycard she needs in exchange for the return of the drug bag and vanishes. Extraterritorial doesn’t even make the drug smugglers menacing.

Could You Repeat That?

Also in the cafeteria is Eric Kynch, the security officer from earlier, having lunch with his daughter, Ayleen. The camera lingers on her toy: a pink bunny-shaped voice repeater. She plays with it at the table, and it gets tucked into the narrative like a sneaky easter egg you’re definitely meant to notice.

From here, we move into the “just go with it” section of the movie. Kira and Sara break into a control room, download files from a suspiciously slow computer, and confirm that Kynch was in Afghanistan too. He was responsible for leaking their location to the Taliban, which caused the ambush. Sara survived. That’s why he’s after her now.

There’s a lot of dodgy logic holding the climax together. Sara somehow makes a bomb out of cleaning supplies. She finds the bunny again, now a recording device, and kidnaps Kynch’s daughter. She locks herself in a “safe room” (oxygen-sealed pod-style) and threatens to swap Ayleen for Josh.

Exterritorial Ending

At this point, in the final showdown at the end of Exterritorial, everyone knows Kynch is behind it all. But somehow, they still try to talk Sara down, as if she’s the real threat. The pacing is a mess. Scenes of phone calls and stand-offs feel like they were written to fill time.

Kynch enters the room. He admits everything, that he kidnapped Josh, that he altered the footage, that he struck a deal with the Taliban because he felt betrayed by the military and financially shafted. Sara tries to get him to say it on tape, but he doesn’t fall for it. She gets shot. He sets her up. But surprise: the bunny had been recording.

As she lies on the floor, bleeding, she presses play on the voice repeater. It plays his confession. It’s the kind of moment that might’ve landed if the film had earned any of its emotional stakes. Josh is rescued. Kynch is arrested. We fast-forward eight weeks. Sara is headed to the US with Josh. A helicopter flies overhead. She doesn’t flinch. She’s cured.

Exterritorial has style. It has moments. But it doesn’t have trust in its own storytelling. It wants to explore trauma, institutional betrayal, and maternal resilience, but it never commits to the emotional logic of those themes. It over-explains when it should suggest. It undercuts tension with mismatched beats. But hey, we all need a “no brain” movie sometimes, and this will do the trick nicely.

The Verdict

Exterritorial wants to be a commentary on trauma, motherhood, and the fallibility of institutions. Instead, it’s a goofy, gaslight-heavy thriller that plays like a PTSD fever dream sponsored by algorithmic screenwriting. It’s watchable, barely, but only if you’ve switched your brain off and promised not to ask questions like “Would a consulate really have a playroom staffed by a kidnapper?” or “Why does everyone instantly assume the child never existed?” Would my own mother finish this film? No. She nearly tapped out halfway through and declared, “This might put me off watching any other German movies again.”

Rating: 1.5 government-issued toy bunnies out of 5 🐰 “Come for the thriller. Stay for the shoulder that pops like a Pez dispenser.”

Realism Check: Do consulates have playrooms?

Would German authorities really have no say in an American consulate? Kind of. It’s complicated. Can you make a bomb from a janitor who neatly arranged cleaning supplies? Please don’t. Can trauma make you doubt your memory of your child? Sure. But here, it’s a set dressing for a thriller that doesn’t want to actually explore what that feels like. For more movies set against hostages and escapes, watch Carry On | Stay Online or On The Line

Main Cast & Crew – Exterritorial (2025)

Director & Writer: Christian Zübert

• Producer: Kerstin Schmidbauer
• Production Company: Constantin Television
• Distributor: Netflix
• Starring:
  • Jeanne Goursaud as Sara Wulf
  • Dougray Scott as Eric Kynch
  • Lera Abova as Irina / Kira Volkova
  • Rickson Guy da Silva as Joshua “Josh” Wulf
  • Annabelle Mandeng as Deborah Allen
  • Kayode Akinyemi as Sergeant Donovan
  • Rada Rae as Ayleen Kynch

Exterritorial

Director: Christian Zübert

Date Created: 2025-04-30 18:33

Editor's Rating:
1.5