‘The Trap’ Netflix Review: A German Thriller Blurs Fiction and Reality as a Reclusive Novelist Hunts Her Sister’s Killer

Reality and fiction, life and writing: everything bleeds together in The Trap, a German thriller about a famous novelist’s scheme to catch her sister’s killer. The series, which keeps shifting between what happens in the real world and what happens in its heroine’s imagination, begins the way so many of these shows do, with a crime. Anna, the younger sister of the protagonist, Lisa, has been murdered in her home. The two were very close. Lisa arrived to find Anna covered in blood and already dead, and she caught only a glimpse of the person escaping, too little to identify them.

The trauma left Lisa (Friederike Becht) psychologically fragile, and haunted by never having found the culprit. Over the years she became a bestselling author under the pen name Lisa Konrad. She lives in a sprawling mansion her publisher bought for her with her royalties, and she never leaves it. Everything she writes, which the series brings to life on screen, she writes from there, and it is also where she meets with her editor, her agent and her therapist. Nobody knows who she really is, and she seems perfectly content with that arrangement.

Then one day, flipping through TV channels, she sees a face she knows. It belongs to the person she saw running out of her sister’s house after the murder: the well-known journalist Robert Lenzen (Hans Löw). Lisa is certain he is the killer. As she starts writing a novel about her sister’s case, which we watch unfold as a series within the series, she also hatches a plan to confront him and bring him down. She offers to give her first-ever interview and asks her editor to make sure Robert is the one who conducts it. That, she figures, will let her get hold of his DNA, expose him and prove he is the murderer. It won’t be that easy. Robert is nobody’s fool, and he suspects something. And Lisa herself is not exactly a reliable narrator of her own story.

The Trap plays both sides the entire time. There is the suspense of whether she can actually spring the trap and catch him red-handed. And there is the question of whether Robert is really guilty or whether something else is going on. Over six episodes the show does what these shows tend to do: it contradicts itself, scatters false leads and doubles back on its own steps. It ends up suggesting that the most fragile thread of all is the mental stability of its protagonist, an imaginative, agoraphobic woman whose relationship with the truth may be a tangled one.

This German series doesn’t rise above the Netflix average. It has a good cast, solid production values and a plot that could belong to any of a hundred interchangeable crime novels. What sets it apart, at least at first, is its lead, a woman whose investigation can be sharp and logical but can also get tangled up in the anxiety and anguish that have overwhelmed her since the day she witnessed her sister’s murder.

The show has a certain elegance in the way it mixes reality and fiction (or literature), and Becht makes her character believable, one of those secretive, mysterious writers, in the vein of Elena Ferrante, whose real life almost nobody knows. The short run keeps it from feeling exhausting, and the same goes for its supposed surprises and twists, however convoluted and overwrought they get. Still, nothing here strays from the template of the streaming crime story. But there is an audience for series like this one, which, unlike many of its peers, has the dignity not to underestimate the viewer.