Exterritorial

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

Sara and her young 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 asks Regional Security Officer Eric Kynch and Sergeant Donovan for help. According to Donovan, Sara entered the consulate alone and no child was 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 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) pills. Sara is deemed to be having a psychiatric episode, and she is asked to leave the consulate.

Instead, Sara goes into hiding in the building and searches for Josh. There she meets Irina, who has been held captive at the consulate for almost two months. Irina offers to help her find Josh, in return for helping her to leave the consulate. Sara finds a bag of illegal drugs in an employee’s locker at the consulate, so she suspects Josh may have been kidnapped because he witnessed the transaction.

After consulate security finds Sara, Kynch injects her with a sedative and she 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 PTSD and her 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 Russian 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, by sharing incriminating data about Russian crimes 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 as a ruse to get her into the consulate and kidnap her, as he was also in Afghanistan.

Sara had received a video from a journalist showing Kynch meeting with a Taliban militant. According to the journalist, Kynch is corrupt and was responsible for tipping off the Taliban and enabling them to ambush Sara’s group. Sara launches a diversion so Kira can escape to the US via France.

Kynch admits to Sara that he kidnapped Josh and tampered with the surveillance footage. As Sara was the last surviving witness to the Afghanistan incident, and Kynch felt threatened by the journalist’s evidence, so his plan was to get Sara concerned about her son and let her run amok in the consulate 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 digital 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 sell information and 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 kidnapping plan. Sara travels to the US with Josh and plans to meet Kira there.

Last Updated: June 30, 2025 at 11:24