This week on Wow Take A Look At That Oner Theatre is Exterritorial (now on Netflix), a German thriller starring Jeanne Goursaud as a Wickish ex-soldier who MMAs her way through a maddening gaslighting plot. Is there a better way to work through a maddening gaslighting plot? I think not. Christian Zubert writes and directs this gripper set in the U.S. embassy in Germany, and constructed around a few punchy-kicky set pieces that deliver plenty of flash – but is there enough substance to make it more than an exercise in nifty choreography? Mmmmmmaybe.
The Gist: Sara (Goursaud) freezes up. She’s not quite present anymore. She was at the park with her toddler son and had just finished talking to him about his late father when a helicopter passed overhead, triggering a waking PTSD nightmare: That fateful day in Afghanistan. She was a soldier. On a doomed mission. The boy’s dad, an American, was among the casualties. Sara was the only survivor – a miracle perhaps, since she didn’t realize she was pregnant until after. A man accidentally bumps into her at the park and awakens her from an almost trancelike state and she instinctively clobbers him and pins him down. Working in special forces makes a person like this.
Four years after the incident in the park, we see Sara working out. Hard. Punching and kicking and kneeing and elbowing the air with great intensity. How would it feel if she hit you instead? Not great, I bet. There’s a big scar on her shoulder. She takes a prescription pill, fields a call from a journalist who wants to talk about the incident in Afghanistan, blows it off. It’s probably just too much right now. Besides, she hopes to put all that further in the rearview by moving to the U.S. She gathers up now-six-year-old Josh (Rickson Guy da Silva) and they head to the U.S. consulate building to apply for her work visa. Hours go by and she’s still waiting and Josh is restless and she drops him in a nearby children’s play area and walks away for just a moment which is obviously a bad idea because for the brief snatch of time it took for her to fetch a coffee the kid disappears. She frantically searches, but he’s gone. This is the absolute worst feeling a parent can have, this side of the unthinkable.
Sara gets help from security and an embassy honcho named Erik Kynch (Dougray Scott), and is it me, or are these guys a bit too chilly in demeanor considering the situation? Kynch insists there’s no record of the boy checking into the building, which is nonsense, because we watched it happen. But this movie never deviates from Sara’s point-of-view, and don’t you dare forget about those pills she took – pills that help her manage PTSD-derived delusions and psychotic episodes. Right: Uh oh. The German police can’t help, this technically being U.S. territory. Kynch shows her security-cam footage of her in the building with no little boy beside her, which might have been more convincing in a pre-AI world, so now we know this guy probably can’t be trusted.
But we’re a step or two ahead of Sara, who’s still in panic mode, but slowly realizing she’s being gaslit. Kynch and his cohorts lock her in a room, and that’s the first time they underestimate this angry mama bear who’s been separated from her cub – and just so happens to be far more dangerous than the average bear. She climbs out windows and jumps off roofs and smashes a skylight into a basement level and soon finds herself swimming with a school of red herrings: Who were those two suspicious people she saw in the hall at the time of Josh’s disappearance? Can she trust Irina (Lera Abova), who she finds hidden away in a way-too-quiet wing of the consulate, and is willing to quid-pro-quo with Sara if she helps her escape the building? What’s the deal with this duffel bag full of drugs they find? And even more curiously, why hasn’t Kynch pulled every alarm in the building in response to a violently capable ex-special ops soldier being on the loose in a high-security government building? NO SPOILERS, amigo.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Exterritorial is a rough amalgam of political thriller Rendition and John Wick-derivative action movies like Extraction and Atomic Blonde.
Performance Worth Watching: The focus is squarely on Goursaud, who exudes a toughness we never feel compelled to question, even when her character shrugs off a few severe injuries as she asskicks her way through the embassy. You’ll believe that Sara won’t let a dislocated shoulder (or a few implied concussions) get between her and her son.
Memorable Dialogue: Sara tries calling her mother, who unwittingly lights the fuse on the gaslighting plot: “Sara, you are taking your pills, aren’t you?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Exterritorial is the type of movie that seems reasonably convincing until its protagonist clobbers a guy with the lid of a toilet tank, and the guy gets back up to fight some more about 30 seconds later. That’s the first uh huh moment in the film, arriving about a third of the way through to test the tensile strength of our suspension of disbelief. Maintaining the balance of plausibility and OTT violent reverie is the movie’s primary struggle, narratively speaking – Zubert nurtures a realistic tone for a while, before inching away from the verisimilitude of a more realistic conspiracy thriller with every passing roundhouse, chokehold and armbar.
Not that this unofficial bait-and-switch should really be an issue – we swallow whole the ludicrousness of John Wick purely on the basis of its audacious style and technical proficiency. And so Exterritorial finds Zubert winning us over not with the mawkish sentimentality of its emotional storyline, but with the relentlessly brutal choreography and handheld-camera immediacy of its hand-to-hand fight sequences, the likes of which call attention to themselves via the scarceness of edits. It’s the type of flashy look-mom-no-cuts stuff that easily wins over those of us who’ve seen far too many films piecing together fragments into action sequences via the editing room, and are therefore more open to accepting plot contrivances and awkward dialogue when they’re couched within the breathless exhilaration of Very Long Takes. For self-professed movie knowers (guilty!), it’s fish in a barrel, candy from a baby. We’re very easy that way.
Part of my initial struggle with Exterritorial derives from the presupposition that a German film is more likely to give us harder-edged, realistic drama, and less likely to indulge any Hollywood bullshit; silly me, I guess. Zubert teases a little with the former, but eventually leans into the latter, showing more Bourne and Mission: Impossible influences, albeit with a far leaner budget and sense of scale. The plot gets more rickety, and the melodrama more mawkish, the deeper into the third act we get, and Zubert’s attempt to sustain tension for 109 minutes might work better with a more judicious edit. There’s also the nagging sense that the film has nothing to say beyond PTSD is no fun, but such is the basis of countless action films dating back to Rambo — and besides, making it a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller sounds like no fun whatsoever these days. Based on its modest goal to be escapist fare, Exterritorial works just fine.
Our Call: Exterritorial is a rock-solid, entertaining thriller. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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