Netflix’s German film, Exterritorial, revolves around a dedicated mother, Sara, and her desperate attempt to bring her son, Joshua, home. Sara, an ex-soldier, suffered from PTSD, and even though getting back to her regular life had been challenging, she continued to fight her thoughts for the sake of her son. Sara met her husband, an American citizen, during her time in Afghanistan. But unfortunately, he lost his life in an ambush. Joshua grew up never knowing his father, and when life started to get suffocating in Germany, Sara decided to move to the United States. She was offered a well-paying security job there, and she’d always wanted to show Joshua the country his father was from. She had her plans in place, and all she needed was the visa to finally move out of her country. But Sara had no idea what was waiting for her. As soon as she entered the US Consulate General, her life drastically changed.
Spoiler Alert
Was there a connection between the drug racket and the kidnapping of Joshua?
After Sara left her son for five minutes in the playroom at the US Consulate General, she discovered that Joshua had disappeared. She frantically searched for him but to no avail. She begged the security officers to find her son, but they seemed clueless. The regional security officer, Eric Kynch, tried to establish that Sara was not in her right senses. He tried to gaslight her into thinking that she was alone when she came to the US Consulate General, and it was all just something that she made up in her head. But Sara trusted her memory and refused to be manipulated by a man she barely knew. Sara suspected that her son might have been smuggled out of the US Consulate General’s office or that he was kidnapped. But she couldn’t understand the reason behind it. Sara had seen a suspicious-looking man with a duffle bag, and she was convinced that the bag would help her find her answers. Sara managed to sneak out of the room she was locked in. She was advised to return home, and the officers were waiting for the local police to escort her. But Sara refused to leave until she found Joshua because she knew that once she stepped out of the building, they would never allow her to again. As she tried to find her son, she met Irina, who was, in a way, held captive in the building. She was ready to help Sara navigate the place as long as she could get her out of the building. It was then that Sara came across the duffle bag that she’d previously spotted, and she discovered drugs stored in the bag. She assumed that her son’s kidnapping had something to do with drugs, but she couldn’t join the dots. Sara was once again captured by Eric’s men, and this time Consul General Deborah Allen tried explaining to her that she was suffering mentally, and they showed her video footage to establish that she was indeed alone when she had entered the US Consulate General. Sara started to second-guess herself; for the first time, she wondered if they were right and she was wrong. But thankfully, Irina came to her rescue.
She explained that her real name was Kira Wolkowa, and she belonged to an influential family from Belarus. Her father was guilty of money laundering, and when he switched parties, the authorities were terrified, and they had him killed. Kira managed to make it to the US embassy in Minsk to avoid becoming the next target. Kira had a thumb drive that held all evidence against her father, and those who had killed her father wanted it. Instead of being transferred directly to the US, Kira was sent to Frankfurt, and she had been waiting for months to make it out of Germany. She had realized that they had no intention of helping her, and she was essentially stuck in the US Consulate General building. Kira strongly believed that the men who’d attacked her and Sara managed to break into her room because Eric’s right-hand man, Sergeant Donovan, had helped them. He’d asked Kira for her passport a few days before the attack. Kira begged Sara to get back on her feet and to not give up on finding her son. To lure the owners of the blue duffle bag they’d found, Kira dropped a message on the consulate’s intranet. As was expected, a man showed interest, and they agreed to meet at the cafeteria. When Sara asked the man about her son, he pretended to know where Joshua was. But Sara was a trained soldier, and she could tell when someone was bluffing. Even though the man, who was just a tech guy working there and was involved in a side hustle, didn’t know about where Joshua was, Sara figured he could be of use to them. In exchange for the bag, Sara asked him to make them a key card with all access and the floor plan of the building. While he thought it was a steep ask, Sara refused to budge. The man obliged and got her what she asked for. After talking to the tech guy, Sara realized that her son’s kidnapping didn’t have anything to do with the drug racket.
What was Eric’s motive?
When Sara and Kira sneaked into Donovan’s office and went through his computer, they discovered that the emails Sara had received from a US security company were actually sent by Donovan. So, Sara was right; they were messing with her, but why? Sara wondered if Deborah was the mastermind, but she couldn’t find any dirt on her. When they started digging into Eric’s past, Sara found out that he too had been a soldier in Afghanistan and later became the Regional Specialist in Islamabad, Pakistan. Sara immediately remembered that an investigative journalist had contacted her that morning. He’d sent her a video shot in Islamabad. The video, which was related to Sara and her husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, featured a man, and Sara realized that he was none other than Eric Kynch. She contacted the journalist who’d sent her the video. She told him that she recognized Eric, and she wanted to get more information on him. She learned from the journalist that, because of an injury, his military career came to an end and that his name often came up in corruption cases, but he was always shielded. The video evidence and a testimony from a source in Pakistan confirmed that Kynch was involved in leaking information to the Taliban, and that was how Sara and her team were ambushed in Afghanistan. The journalist had contacted Sara because she was the only survivor of the ambush, and he hoped that she would be able to identify the man Eric was seen talking to in the video. Sara realized that the man Eric was talking to was a Taliban militant, further confirming the allegation.
It became obvious that Eric had planned to destroy Sara because he was afraid of spending the rest of his life in prison. Sara realized that she was putting Kira’s life in danger because, clearly, Eric wanted her out of the picture. She advised Kira to hide in one of the trucks that was leaving from the Consulate General building. She asked Kira to take a train to France and fly to Mexico, so she could attempt to make it to the US from there. After helping Kira escape, Sara finally got the chance to confront Eric. She wanted to know why he exposed them to the Taliban. Eric wanted Sara to believe that her life was in danger because of the journalist. He’d been putting Eric under so much pressure that he felt compelled to silence Sara. He had no intention of letting go of Joshua, and Sara realized that there was no way she could negotiate with Eric.
How did Eric plan on using Sara?
Since she had no other option, Sara decided to kidnap Eric’s daughter, Aileen. She had stolen Aileen’s recording toy device from the cafeteria to prove that she was indeed sent by her father. The little girl trusted her, and Sara locked herself and Aileen in a chamber and refused to leave until Eric returned Joshua. Deborah caught a whiff of the chaos, and she demanded Eric work according to protocol. Sara was to be shot dead on sight. Eric pretended to be innocent, and he knew that Sara was not a killer and would not harm his daughter. Sara turned off the aircon to put Eric under pressure, but even then he didn’t budge. She felt guilty for making Aileen suffer for her father’s sins, so she turned back on the aircon and released Aileen under the condition that she wanted to speak to Eric alone. She wanted to negotiate a deal; she was ready to kill herself if in return Eric could promise to ensure that Joshua would be safe. Eric turned off the speaker, fearing that the truth would surface. Deborah didn’t know about his past crimes, and she was still under the belief that Sara was delusional and needed help. Sara realized that Eric was ready to kill her, but before that, she believed he owed her an explanation.
Eric told her that he had heard she was a fighter, but he chose to take his chance. He believed that his plan started to fall apart the minute Sara witnessed the bag exchange. Even after Sara entered the other building and met Kira, he chose not to interfere. He had assumed Kira’s kidnapping would go according to plan, but he was stunned when Sara took down two trained assassins, and it messed everything up for him. As it turned out, Eric had been paid off by the party who wanted to kidnap Kira and steal the thumb drive she was in possession of. Eric wanted to execute two plans simultaneously. On one hand, he planned Kira’s kidnapping, and by luring Sara to the US Consulate General, he wanted to cover his tracks. He wanted to prove that Sara was deranged (that was why he kidnapped Joshua, and he chose not to interfere when she escaped from the room she was locked in). He also painstakingly erased Joshua from the surveillance footage to prove she was mentally unstable, and after Kira went missing, everyone would have assumed that she was responsible for it somehow. Eric would have then been allowed to shoot Sara, the only witness to his Taliban association.
Did Sara survive?
Eric was frustrated with his life post-injury. He’d realized that even after dedicating his whole life to the military, he lacked financial stability and the grief that came with the job was too unbearable. So, he decided to find ways to make extra money at the cost of innocent lives. Eric tried to justify his actions, saying that he did what he had to for his family. But Sara refused to listen to his hopeless whining, and she asked him to leave. But before he left the sealed chamber, he shot Sara in the abdomen, shot himself in the leg, and left the gun with Sara. Eric established that Sara was dangerous and she could kill anyone to get what she wanted. To protect the lives of the people in the building, Deborah made a tough call. She decided to bomb the chamber. As the countdown for the explosion began, Sara crawled and grabbed the toy with the recording device embedded in it. She reached the speaker and played the audio.
Exterritorial’s ending confirmed that Sara had recorded Eric’s confession and there was no way he could escape. While Donovan attempted to escape, Eric stood outside the chamber in silence. It was all over. Joshua was rescued by the military, he had been locked in a secret room in the building. Sara received treatment for her bullet wound. Thankfully, she survived, and she was finally reunited with her son. Eight weeks later, Sara and Joshua were ready to move to the United States. Sara didn’t give up on her dream of starting her life all over again. She still carried the wounds from her past, and her heart raced a little every time she saw a helicopter, but she’d also learned to face the demons instead of hiding from them. She knew life would never stop challenging her, but she was ready for the fight in the hopes of providing her child a comfortable life. We also discovered that Sara and Kira were still in touch. Kira safely made it to the United States and was presumably living with her mother in Boston. The video call confirmed that the two friends would be reunited soon.
