Amid all sorts of brilliant filmmakers creating movies that touch you and present a new cinematic experience, I feel a good action movie full of tropes can be a good change of pace. Christian Zübert’s new Netflix release, Exterritorial, is a blend of seamless action sequences, crisp editing, and a genuinely brilliant Jeanne Goursaud kicking butt on repeat. So here we are discussing everything that happens in this latest Netflix film.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?
Sara Wulf, a Bundeswehr veteran (German ex-military), and her son, Joshua, visit the US Consulate in Frankfurt, hoping that Sara can get an H1 work visa. A little background on Sara: her husband perished in battle, and the Taliban helicopter that bombed her squad and husband has left a deep scar in Sara’s heart. She suffers from PTSD, and she gets triggered by helicopters and narrow hallways, the last two things she remembers from the attack. Afghanistan is now behind Sara, and she wants to take up a job in America. After losing Joshua at the airport once, she loses him again in the consulate. But this time she’s unable to find him, no matter where she looks. To help Sara find Joshua, the regional security officer, Erik Kynch, comes forward, with Sergeant Donovan assisting him. They check every room nearby, but Joshua has disappeared from a building that is supposed to be the safest place in all of Frankfurt. Sara saw a man and a woman exchange a bag earlier, just around the time Joshua went missing. But after multiple attempts to find her son, Kynch reveals that there’s no record of Joshua checking into the building. Donovan also says he never saw a kid with Sara, even though we, as the audience, know he did. German police have no authority to interfere in the consulate, as it is an extraterritorial building, so Sara takes the matter into her own hands to find her son.
What’s in the bag?
Kynch leaves Sara to wait until German police come to pick her up, but Sara breaks out of the room to try and find a clue or two. Seeing there’s no way she can break the doors down in the visitors building, Sara goes out of the window to climb her way into the restricted areas. After a long period of careful climbing, she eventually falls down to the ground. This time, she breaks into another building and comes across a woman called Irina staying in the consulate residence. Irina freaks out at first, but both of them soon understand that the other can help them. Irina is a political refugee who doesn’t want to stay in the consulate anymore, and Sara could use Irina’s knowledge about the building. Meanwhile, Kynch reports the incident to his boss, Deborah, who is concerned about a highly trained soldier running free on the premises. But Kynch reassures her and makes it seem like Sara is just a worried mother and shouldn’t be a problem. Sara is also suspicious that the consulate security isn’t trying hard to look for her. Soon, Sara and Irina find the locker where the aforementioned bag is kept, and they find drugs inside the bag. When they come back to Irina’s room, two mercenaries ambush them and try to abduct Irina, but Sara takes them down after a prolonged struggle. Sadly for Sara, when she goes out to ask for help, Kynch takes her down with an injection.
Is the CCTV footage real?
When Sara opens her eyes, she’s greeted by Deborah and Kynch. She asks them to find her kid again, and Kynch shows her the CCTV footage. Every time we see Sara and Joshua together, it seems like Sara is hallucinating. The footage shows no trace of Joshua, and it seems like Sara was talking to the air all this while. Sara completely loses her sanity after this, and they leave her alone until the German authorities come and pick her up. The next morning, Sara finds someone untying her, and it’s none other than Irina. Irina convinces her that she’s real and that the authorities are trying to cover something up. They take the window route to make their exit and end up in a conference room full of visitors and people. Irina reveals the truth, that her real name is Kira. Her father was a politician in Belarus, and they were among the richest families in the country. When Kira’s father changed parties, his former party got him arrested for money laundering, and she took all the evidence on a pen drive and escaped. So they obviously wanted Kira too, and she took refuge in the US Embassy of Minsk. Kira eventually ended up in the Frankfurt Consulate, and now she’s almost stuck here. Kira explains how they are gaslighting Sara into believing her kid isn’t real.
Who was behind the attack in Afghanistan?
Sara checks her mail again to see the video a journalist sent her earlier in the movie, and she comes across a familiar face. The video shows Mr. Kynch sitting in an Islamabad hotel, talking with someone whose face is reflected in the mirror. When Kira looked Kynch’s profile up, all she could find were corruption cases, but Sara noticed Kynch serving in Islamabad as a regional specialist during her time in Afghanistan. It’s clear that he was the one who provided the intel to the Taliban, and Sara recognized the Taliban agent he’s seen talking to in the video. Kira posts about the missing bag on the consulate’s intranet, and they get a response pretty quickly. It’s the same man who we saw handling the bag earlier, and Sara takes an all-access keycard along with the plans of the building in exchange for the bag. She successfully sneaks Kira into a truck that is scheduled to leave soon and beats a whole lot of people up to distract them. Even after all this mess, Kynch refuses to raise an alarm and asks his people not to report to anyone else.
Does Sara find her son?
After Sara successfully gets Kira out, she sets off an explosion in the NSA building. Deborah has had enough, and she orders Kynch to raise the alarm. They initiate the code red and order a shoot-on-sight for Sara. Meanwhile, Sara gets to Kynch’s daughter, Aileen, and abducts her. Sara takes Aileen to a self-sufficient safe room. She knows that she can control the oxygen in the room, and that nobody can access the room without blowing the door open, which would put Aileen at risk. Even after getting his daughter abducted, Kynch doesn’t flinch and refuses to admit to his crimes. He knows Sara doesn’t have the heart to kill a child, and he uses it to his own advantage.
Desperate for a solution, Sara strikes a deal with Deborah; she asks Kynch to come in and sends his daughter out. Kynch comes in, and Sara tries to make him confess, but he’s too smart for that. Sara was banking on the listening device of the room by leaving it on, but he turned it off before speaking a word. Kynch admits that he made a mistake by not listening to the people who knew Sara. Everybody had warned him about her resilience and fighting spirit, but Kynch thought he could handle her. He wanted to kill two birds with one stone, have Kira abducted, and shift the blame to Sara. Kynch intentionally let her escape to let the assassins in to abduct Kira and also took Joshua and erased his existence to prove Sara has gone off the rails. He thinks that he is the one who has the advantage here and shoots Sara before shooting himself in the leg to make it look like she got hold of his gun. Kynch walks out of the room, and just when the soldiers are planting the bombs on the door, Sara crawls to the listening device, holding the toy phone she took from Aileen. The device recorded everything Kynch said. He was mad with the government for ruining his career, and he would have got away with it if not for Sara.
Exterritorial ends with Kynch getting arrested and Sara and Joshua finally having a normal life, a life where Sara doesn’t get triggered by helicopters anymore.
