Exterritorial is an action movie built around a mother who claims her son was kidnapped inside the American Embassy in Germany when they were seeking passports. There’s plenty of gaslighting in the plot, aided by the mother’s PTSD from her time as a soldier. There’s also a strong thread of a mother who will never give up on finding her son.
Exterritorial stars Jeanne Goursaud as Sara. She’s a former German soldier who was stationed in Afghanistan. She’s dealing with PTSD from that time and often has flashbacks. Her husband, a fellow soldier from America, was killed there along with 8 other soldiers in an ambush. Only Sara survived. She was pregnant at the time. Her son Josh (Rickson Guy Da Silva) is now about six years old.
Sara takes Josh to the American embassy to deal with needed paperwork so that they can go to the U.S. to let Josh meet his family there and so Sara can take a new job as a security officer.
Sara leaves Josh in a playroom to get coffee from a machine. When she returns, he is gone. She starts searching for him. She asks for help from officials there.
A Sergeant Donovan (Kayode Akinyemi) and the American diplomat, Erik Kynch (Dougray Scott), try to convince her that she came in alone. They show her CCTV video of her supposedly alone. They try to hold her in a room before turning her over to the German police.
Even though she freezes up with flashbacks, she isn’t going to be gaslit into believing their story. She escapes the room. The remainder of the film is typical action movie with stunts, fights, danger, and fearless exploits as Sara ranges through hidden passages, basements, and rooftops in the huge embassy searching for Josh.
Sara finds Irina (Lera Abova) in a basement apartment. Irina wants out of there for her own reasons and teams up with Sara to find Josh and get out of there.
I thought Jeanne Goursaud was excellent as the determined mom. She handled the fight scenes beautifully and was both tough and tender as needed. There were powerful people who wanted her out of the picture. The storyline was well written with slow reveals back to something in Afghanistan that had led to the current situation. Overall Exterritorial is a decent escapist action movie.
The film is available on Netflix. Although it’s set in Germany, they are in the American Embassy where people speak English a lot of the time. There is some reading of subtitles for the German.