The Trap

A decade after discovering the body of her murdered sister, Lisa (Friederike Becht) is now a best-selling author writing under a pseudonym in German thriller The Trap. She never leaves the extravagant villa her publisher lets her stay in, she’s estranged from her parents, and only her therapist knows about her past. When she spots the face of successful journalist Robert Lenzen (Hans Löw) on TV, she becomes convinced that’s the man she saw the night of the murder. Determined to prove that he’s the killer, she hatches a plan to obtain his DNA. She begins writing a book about the incident, hoping to secure an exclusive interview with him.

Although this latest Netflix outing doesn’t have the most original premise, with it bearing striking similarities to last year’s The Beast in Me, its strong cast and unreliable narrator are used to full effect. The result is a familiar but nevertheless compelling slow-burn thriller where everything isn’t as it seems.

The trauma of what happened has left Lisa with severe anxiety. She suffers from debilitating panic attacks and has frequent flashbacks to the fateful night. The latter is executed with flair as environments seamlessly shift around the protagonist. Working on the novel becomes Lisa’s way of processing events, with the show blurring the lines between fact and fiction and past and present. Becht does an outstanding job at conveying her character’s pain as her determination threatens to tip into obsession. While her fraying mental state gives viewers reason to doubt her account, enough suspicion is placed on other characters to suggest that something more sinister could be afoot. The script constantly plays on this uncertainty, gradually layering in new revelations and snippets of information to thicken the plot.

Audiences won’t know who to believe by the time the show takes a darker turn at its midway point. This Netflix series may have all the conventional genre trappings that viewers have come to expect from a plethora of similar offerings on the streaming platform, complete with a moody title sequence and bourgeois parties, but The Trap knows how to use them to its advantage to craft an intriguing mystery that’s carried by a standout turn from Becht.

Andrew Murray

The Trap is released on Netflix on 13^th October 2026.

Watch the trailer for The Trap here: