Straightforward European action movies are ten-a-penny on Netflix – we had, say, Ad Vitam recently, but it’s rubbish, so don’t think about it too much – so it takes a lot for one to really stand out. And while I’m not entirely sure Exterritorial does stand out in the way it would like to, it’s definitely pretty good in a variety of ways. It’s pretty bad in a few others, granted, but those are fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Let me explain.
The first thing is the smart move of transplanting a horror cliché – a woman with a history of mental illness being gaslit about her kid – into an action movie. All the usual hallmarks are there, but enjoyably tweaked. Sara’s (Jeanne Goursaud, Blood Coast, Barbarians) PTSD doesn’t come from losing a child or having a car crash, but from a bungled mission in Afghanistan, since she’s a highly trained badass former special forces soldier. She isn’t being manipulated by a ghost or a demon or a crazy husband, but by a U.S. official, Erik Kynch (Dougray Scott). And she isn’t pinballing around a rickety old house or the sterile corridors of a psychiatric institution, but instead the U.S. consulate building, hence the title – government buildings are considered exterritorial, so the consulate is sovereign American territory despite being located in Germany. Sara’s in Uncle Sam’s backyard. And she’s on her own.
The other thing is craft. Exterritorial is built around a bunch of visceral hand-to-hand fight and chase sequences that are shot with real clarity and sometimes daring verve. There’s a oner in this (see that entire episode of The Studio for more on this storied cinematic technique). The choreography is slick and believably performed. Goursaud is a pretty small and very conventionally attractive lady, but I was a little bit terrified of her by the end of this. It’s all good stuff.
So what’s the problem? We’ll get to that. First, a bit more plot context is necessary.
So, Sara is traumatized from that Afghanistan mission and still can’t hear a helicopter pass by without falling into a trance, but she’s determined to keep herself in shape – cue a training montage – and provide the best life possible for her six-year-old son, Josh (newcomer Rickson Guy da Silva), whose father was killed on that doomed mission. To this end, she has taken a job in the U.S., which requires a brief visit to the consulate to apply for a work visa. Simple, bureaucratic stuff. Annoying, but easy. Until Sara turns her back for a minute while Josh is in the building’s play area and he promptly disappears.
Lera Abova and Jeanne Goursaud in Exterritorial | Image via Netflix
Sara is adamant that Josh has been taken, but Erik, who turns up to help manage the situation, insists that he was never there in the first place. Sara takes pills to manage her psychotic episodes – or she’s supposed to, anyway. We know about her trauma. Nobody seems to have seen Josh. These people can’t all be lying, can they? Well, yes. And that’s the problem I was talking about. Exterritorial has no interest in sustaining the ambiguity. It becomes obvious virtually immediately that Sara is being gaslit, and from there, things proceed in the manner of a typical action movie. And that’s fine, since the action is good and the payoff is worth waiting for (albeit completely predictable). But one can’t help but feel like more could have been made of the premise.
Still, it’s difficult to overstate how much heavy lifting the choreography is doing, even in a stew of increasingly overblown conspiratorial plot turns which are unravelled thick and fast once Sara teams up with Irina (Lera Abova, Anna), a woman she finds in one of the embassy apartments as a kind of political prisoner for reasons that get their own little subplot. As silly as all this stuff is, it’s grounded by the relentless intimacy and immediacy of the action, which is filmed close-up and handheld and in unusually long takes that deliberately draw attention to how much of this is being performed by the actors and not stunt doubles. Maybe I’m just a sucker for that stuff, but I found it very involving nonetheless, and a cut above the usual action in this kind of fare.
And all this is why I’d recommend Exterritorial pretty confidently, despite its third-act descent into melodrama and the preponderance of contrivances and stilted line readings. It’s not trying to be politically contentious or thematically resonant, it’s just a set-’em-up-knock-’em-down action movie with an impressive degree of craft. It’ll keep you occupied for 90 minutes and will probably leave you pretty satisfied. That’s exactly as good as a movie like this needs to be.