@joelkeller Published Oct. 13, 2026, 4:35 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results.
You ever watch a show that you generally like but wonder if the one thing that annoys you about it is going to ruin your viewing experience? That’s what happened when we watched Netflix’s new German thriller The Trap.
Opening Shot: Two women have a good time dancing at a club. A voiceover says, “I had a sister who was three years younger than me. Her name was Anna. I loved her. So much.”
The Gist: Anna Wilking (Josephine Thiesen) was brutally murdered almost ten years ago. Since then, her sister Lisa (Friederike Becht), who found her and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital after the killing, has decided to live a life in isolation. She’s become a bestselling author under the name Lisa Konrad and never leaves the massive villa she rents from the publishing company. Only her psychiatrist knows the whole truth.
One night, she wakes up to see a press conference on her TV. In the crowd of journalists is a haunting face, the same face she saw in the wings the night of Anna’s murder; he’s the one she calls “The Monster” in her therapy sessions. After doing some online sleuthing, she finds out who he is: Robert Lenzen (Hans Löw), a journalist in Berlin. When she calls Leon Weber (Michael Klammer), the police detective who investigated the case, Leon’s partner tells her that she needs proof, like DNA. This isn’t the first off-the-wall phone call Leon has gotten from Lisa over the past decade.
Lisa sets out to get the proof by starting a new novel, a roman à clef about a painter named Sophie (Miriam Ohlmeyer) whose sister was murdered. She will then request that Lenzen come to her house to interview her, which is when he will collect a sample of his DNA.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The cat-and-mouse nature of The Trap, written and directed by Isabel Kleefeld, reminds us of I Will Find You, one of the many Harlan Coben series on Netflix.
Our Take: There’s more than a little bit of absurdity to The Trap that begs the viewer not to look at things too closely and just enjoy the ride. The series has plenty of tension, and we get to know Lisa’s psyche pretty well by the end of the first episode, though we know nothing about Robert as yet. So that ride is indeed enjoyable.
But the head-scratching moments are there. It’s not just the moments when it seems that Lisa’s imagination is happening in real life; those we can handle. It’s when, instead of getting true flashbacks to how Lisa conducted herself and interacted with Leon, the police detective, in the months after Anna’s murder, we get how Sophie acted and reacted. So we get to see the actress playing Sophie talking about her dead sister Anna and interacting with Leon. Given that Leon is played by the same actor in both factual and fictional timelines, and that Brecht and Ohlmeyer look enough alike to make you do a double-take, that makes things a bit more confusing than they should be.
It could be that the premise is too straightforward — Lisa wants to lure Robert into providing her with a DNA sample — but it feels that the intrigue around Lisa’s agoraphobia and unyielding conviction that Robert killed Anna would be enough without the distraction of the scenes with Sophie.
Performance Worth Watching: Friederike Becht plays Lisa’s paranoia quite well, and gives the viewer just enough doubt about her convictions to pull them along as she sets this trap for Robert.
Parting Shot: Lisa envisions Robert running away from Anna’s murder, and says “Yours,” meaning that his DNA is the only DNA not accounted for at the crime scene.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The basic idea behind The Trap is certainly interesting enough to keep us watching; we just wish the storytelling in this series was a bit cleaner and easier to follow than what the first episode showed us.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
