Exterritorial

Not to be confused with Exterritoriality or Extraterritoriality.

Exterritorial
Release poster
Directed by	Christian Zübert
Written by	Christian Zübert
Produced by	Götz Marx Kerstin Schmidbauer Franziska Suppee Verena Vogl
Starring	Jeanne Goursaud Dougray Scott Lera Abova
Cinematography	Matthias Pötsch
Edited by	Ueli Christen
Music by	Sara Barone
Production companies	Constantin Film EPO Film Productions
Distributed by	Netflix
Release date	30 April 2025 (2025-04-30)
Running time	109 minutes
Country	Germany
Languages	German English

Exterritorial is a 2025 German action thriller film directed and written by Christian Zübert and starring Jeanne Goursaud, Dougray Scott, and Lera Abova. The film was released on Netflix on April 30, 2025. It is about a former special forces soldier with PTSD (played by Jeanne Gordaud) who is determined to find her young son after he disappears in the US Consulate in Germany.

Plot

Sara Wulf is a former Special Forces soldier who served in Afghanistan until 2017. She was the only survivor of an incident in which eight soldiers were killed.

Sara and her son Joshua (Josh) visit the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt to apply for a work visa. During their lengthy stay, she leaves Josh in a playroom; when she returns, he is gone.

Sara therefore asks Regional Security Officer Eric Kynch and Sergeant Donovan for help. According to Donovan, Joshua was not checked in, and the surveillance footage also shows only Sara without her son.

Sara contacts the German police, but German authorities have no authority in American extraterritorial territory. Her mother, Anja, does not believe her either; she suspects that Sara has not taken her pills. Sara is therefore asked to leave the consulate.

Instead, Sara goes into hiding in the building and searches for Josh herself. There she meets Irina, who has been held captive at the consulate for almost two months. She offers to help her find Josh, in return for to leave the consulate. Sara finds a bag of drugs in the consulate, so she suspects Josh may have witnessed something.

After a fight, Sara receives an injection from Kynch and falls unconscious. When she wakes up, Consul General Deborah Allen is at her bedside. She was contacted by Sara's mother, who is concerned about Sara's post-traumatic stress disorder and delusions following her deployment to Afghanistan, during which Joshua's father was also killed.

Later, Sara is freed by Irina, whose real name is Kira Volkova. Her father was a Belarusian dissident and was killed by the government. Kira fled to the US embassy in Minsk; the CIA had brought her to Frankfurt. Kira wants to go to Boston to see her mother, and from there, with data on a USB stick, she hopes to free other dissidents.

Sara has a job offer with a security firm in the US that is recruiting female ex-soldiers. She discovers that Kynch is behind the offer to get her into the consulate, as he was also in Afghanistan.

Sara had received a video from a journalist showing Kynch with a Taliban militant. According to the journalist, Kynch is corrupt and was responsible for the ambush Sara's group fell into. Sara launches a diversion so Kira can escape to the US via France.

Kynch confesses to kidnapping Josh and tampering with the surveillance footage. As Sara was the last surviving witness to the Afghanistan incident, and Kynch felt pressured by the journalist, his plan was to let Sara run amok so he could shoot her in self-defense.

Sara kidnaps Kynch's daughter Aileen and takes her to a safe room. She initially tries to trade her for Josh, but then changes her mind and releases her. Sara later secretly records Kynch's confession on Aileen's tape recorder. Kynch himself was a soldier and felt unsupported by the military in dealing with trauma, as well as financially disadvantaged. Therefore, he made a deal with the Taliban to improve his financial situation.

After Sara is shot and injured by Kynch, Josh is freed. Eight weeks later, Sara calls Kira; Kynch is now in custody in the US. Donovan and the man at the check-in desk were also involved in Kynch's plan. Sara travels to the US with Josh and plans to meet Kira there.

Cast

• Jeanne Goursaud as Sara Wulf, a former Special Forces soldier struggling from PTSD
• Dougray Scott as Erik Kynch, a consulate security officer
• Lera Abova as Irina, a refugee hiding at the consulate, whose real name is Kira Volkova
• Kayode Akinyemi as Sergeant Donovan
• Annabelle Mandeng as Deborah Allen
• Lara Babalola as a service manager information desk
• Godfrey Egbon as Evan
• Kris Saddler as Justin Martello
• Rada Rae as Aileen, Erik Kynch's daughter
• Rickson Guy da Silva as Josh, Sara Wulf's son
• Susanne Michel as Anja, Sara's mother
• Samuel Tehrani as the Taliban Leader

Production

The film was produced by Constantin Film, with Kerstin Schmidbauer as producer and Oliver Berben as executive producer. Filming took place in Vienna with the support of FISAplus, and ended in late 2023. Filming took place at, among other locations, the Althanstraße University Center, the site of the Vienna University of Economics and Business from 1982 to 2013.

Matthias Pötsch was the cameraman, Sara Barone wrote the music, Ueli Christen was in charge of editing, and Cornelia von Braun and Lisa Stutzky were in charge of casting. Heike Lange was the set designer, Anna Zeitlhuber the costume designer, Herbert Verdino the sound designer, and Aurora Hummer the make-up designer. Katharina Haudum served as intimacy coordinator, and Florian Hotz as stunt coordinator.

Release

Exterritorial released by Netflix on April 30, 2025.

Reception

Critical response

The film received positive to mixed reviews.

Jake Dee explained the huge success of the film on movieweb.de: Exterritorial is a character-driven redemption story in the guise of a Die Hard-style actioner. Yet, for Sara, it's less about avenging external enemies and more about exterminating her inner demons... with its undeniable entertainment value, it's easy to see why the movie is so popular.

Fabian Riedner on quotenmeter.de called it: an action film with a strong story, which people enjoy watching and which shows that German genre cinema has a lot to offer.

Tilmann P. Gangloff awarded the film 4.5 out of 6 stars on tittelbach.tv. He called the production a gripping, high-tension thriller. The way the heroine bludgeons her way through the plot in the style of "Die Hard" is painful to watch, but still captivates, or rather, for over a hundred minutes.

Peter Osteried rated the production on kinofans.com with 2/5 stars. There are plenty of stories about people being made to believe they're crazy because the person they believe they lost wasn't even there, such as frantic and flightplan. The narrative always unfolds the same way, and even Zübert can't find anything original in it. It's as if you've seen the film several times before, only the setting is different. The action also seems forced, and the fight sequences are patchy.

Derwatchdog.de (1.5 out of 5 points) criticized the production as an uninspired thriller clone. While the Netflix thriller Carry-On, with its similarly directed approach, was able to maximize its old-school thriller premise in its simplicity, Exterritorial almost completely misses its mark.

Thomas Schulze wrote on the-spot-mediafilm.com: Christian Zübert has made an action film with a clear premise and execution, so that everything is subordinate to this premise and execution. It is a film of the greatest possible straightforwardness, the plot concentrated on one day and a character who is the center of attention at every moment. What she sees, is what we see. What she experiences, is what we experience. Apart from two or three flashbacks, which are important for understanding her emotional world, we are always with her, the German Special Forces soldier Sara, played by Jeanne Goursaud in a breathtaking one-woman show.

Oliver Armknecht (4 out of 10 points) wrote on film-rezensionen.de that the fights were impressive, but failed to balance out the increasingly stupid story.

Josef Grübl wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the film wasn't particularly exciting or even surprising. The fact that one stays with it, however, has to do with its leading actress. Sara fights, climbs, and fails with full physical commitment. She dishes out a lot and takes a lot; she's clever and has heart.

Views

According to FlixPatrol, the film reached number one on the Netflix charts in 79 countries on May 2, 2025.

External links

• Exterritorial at IMDb
• Exterritorial (2025) on Netflix