From BZ/dpa
In films like “Nikita” or “Wer ist Hanna” young women are trained to be contract killers. The Netflix series “Kleo” sets this plot in the former GDR. The bill goes on.
For the young East German agent Kleo Straub, several worlds collapse at the same time: the Stasi, for which she liquidates enemy forces, betrays her – above all her own grandfather. And then the beloved socialism goes down the drain. The Netflix series “Kleo” with Jella Haase, available from Friday (August 19), is a bloody revenge thriller with GDR nostalgia.
“This is a true story. None of that really happened,” says the first of eight 50-minute episodes. Kleo is an unofficial employee of the Stasi. More precisely: assassin. Trained by her own grandfather (Jürgen Heinrich). In 1987, she killed a businessman in a club in West Berlin. Another agent is after his red suitcase.
Police officer Sven Petzold (Dimitrij Schaad) from the fraud department, who is partying privately in the club, can create a phantom drawing. The Stasi is getting too hot, so they take the pregnant Kleo out of circulation as a precaution. Under a pretext she is sentenced to life imprisonment.
Three years later: In the course of the reunification negotiations, the GDR released political prisoners. Kleo seeks revenge and wants to find the culprits for her “deactivation”. Their campaign is part bloodthirsty, part hilarious. Especially in the scenes with Inspector Petzold, who sticks to her heels on his own, and her new roommate Thilo (Julius Feldmeier), a constantly drugged techo freak from the West.
As the story progresses, Kleo uncovers a conspiracy by the secret services and increasingly questions the system in which she grew up, which is being pushed back more and more by the capitalist West.
“I’m not working with the class enemy, at least that’s what I thought. Times change,” the disillusioned ex-agent states in one scene – and even drinks from a can of Coca-Cola.
The German Netflix production, only released for those over 16 due to various murder scenes, impresses with a cool retro look and a terrific performance by Jella Haase (29, “Fack ju Göhte”) in her first leading role in the series. The West Berliner manages to get the audience to show solidarity with the GDR killer, who was disappointed in the system, despite her actions.
“At the beginning I also asked myself the fundamental question of how you can justify such violence – especially at this time,” said Haase of the German Press Agency. “I first had to find my way into an exaggeration and exaggeration, into the created comic world. But that gave it a whole different color and it was fun.”
The three creators of the series, who are also behind the successful gangster epic “4 Blocks”, look at German-German history with a good dose of gallows humour. The 29-year-old Haase calls it a “bizarre approach to the past”, in which Margot Honecker and Erich Mielke also play a surprising role.
The eight episodes of the thriller series Kleo will be available on Netflix from August 19.