She’s an agile, proficient and inventive killer inclined to gleeful giggles when she surveys the results of her handiwork. She was trained by the secret service of a communist country. Disappearing into an array of disguises, she carries out her lethal missions using wigs and wardrobe changes to transform her appearance and identity. She travels to exotic locations to carry out her dirty work and her arrival invariably signals the imminent eruption of violence and mayhem.
Question: Is this Villanelle (Jodie Comer) from Killing Eve?
Answer: It could be, but the description also applies to Kleo Straub (Jella Haase), the anti-heroine of a merrily engaging German espionage thriller (Netflix). And if you’re missing the high-spirited high jinks of Killing Eve, with its idiosyncratic spies, odd alliances and steadily mounting body count, the peppy eight-part Kleo might help to fill the gap.
Jella Haase, left, as the anti-heroine of Netflix’s peppy eight-part series Kleo.Credit:Julia Terjung/Netflix
The series is set in Germany in the 1980s, as the Berlin Wall comes down and the divided country is reunified. Its title character was raised in the East and, until shocking unforeseen events throw her life into chaos, she’d been a dutiful servant of the state. Trained by an “unofficial” department of the Stasi, she excelled as a student and grew into an accomplished assassin.
After establishing her smooth confidence and capability on a mission, the series, created by Hanno Hackfort, Bob Konrad and Richard Kropf and directed by Viviane Andereggen and Jano Ben Chaabane, sees Kleo’s life going dramatically off the rails for reasons that are mysterious and confounding to her. Her relentless quest for answers – and vengeance – provides the trajectory for the fast-paced thriller, which, with its playful blend of espionage action, murder and slightly madcap comedy, mirrors the style and tone of Eve. It also conveys the impression that the people behind the scenes were having fun toying with the genre.
Along with expressive eyes, Haase has one of those malleable faces that can transform with apparent ease. Whether she’s playing a drug-snorting nightclub party gal, a dowdy water inspector, a wealthy widow seeking investment opportunities or a skilled combatant, she’s convincing.
Like Villanelle, Kleo suffered an unhappy home life, spending her formative years under the tight control and stern surveillance of her revered grandfather (Jurgen Heinrich), a senior military officer with a taste for moss cake. And like Villanelle, she’s grown up to be imaginative in her approach to murderous missions. Kleo can extract poison from blowfish, build small bombs and sew them into jackets for subsequent detonation, handle firearms with ease, and wire gas tanks to garage doors. She’s also fearless and fairly indestructible in what becomes a quest to locate an elusive red suitcase that could contain the answers to her questions.
Also like Villanelle, Kleo’s not alone in her adventures. While there’s no Eve (Sandra Oh) as an object of her obsession, there is Andi (Vladimir Burlakov), her former instructor at spy school and subsequent lover. And there’s a lively collection of quirky characters woven around them, some of whom become unexpectedly endearing.
Blundering West German fraud-squad detective Sven Petzold (Dimitrij Schaad, who played Villanelle’s step-brother in an episode of Killing Eve) is eager to prove to his bosses that he’s destined for bigger and better things in the homicide squad. He remains determinedly on the trail of a killer that no-one else cares about and the way his relationship with Kleo develops is happily surprising.
Co-opted by Kleo as a housemate, weedy techno-music devotee and enthusiastic druggie Thilo (Julius Feldmeier) resembles the also-blond and weedy Spike, Rhys Ifans’ memorable housemate to Hugh Grant’s William in Notting Hill. Like Spike, Thilo is prone to wildly inappropriate comments and behaviour, yet he remains oddly likable. Unlike Spike, Thilo believes he’s on a mission from another planet and will one day be returned to his home and its waiting princess.
Haase as Kleo Straub in the Netflix spy series Kleo.Credit:Julia Terjung/Netflix
Beyond them, miscellaneous others pop into the frame to keep proceedings lively: coolly efficient agent Min Sun (Yun Huang); Uwe (Vincent Redetzki), Kleo’s dogged, profanity-spewing colleague from spy school; and Anne Geike (Alessija Lause), an elegant West German official who suggests shades of Fiona Shaw’s wonderfully cryptic MI6 spy handler Carolyn Martens in Eve. Then there’s the hovering East German dignitary with the blue hair, and it’s not the kind of subtle rinse popular with greying women in the 1950s and ’60s: it’s a bold bright blue.
The eye-catching hairstyle is in sync with the series’ striking visual design, which favours vivid, cartoon-like colours and artful compositions. As with Eve, its landscape is enlivened by travel to a range of destinations. The dour East German and decadent West German settings open out to more exotic locations as Kleo travels to Spain, Cuba and Chile to pursue her mission of bringing to justice, or retribution, to those who have derailed her life.
En route, as comparisons to Killing Eve abound, Kleo also goes its own way with a flourish and without descending into a pale clone. The adventures culminate in a wry, tonally appropriate postscript surveying the fates of many of the characters involved in Kleo’s crusade. And the good news for viewers who get that far and enjoy the ride is that Netflix has just announced a second season.
Kleo is now streaming on Netflix.
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