Luna's Revenge

When 17-year-old Luna went on vacation in the mountains with her little sister and her parents, she witnessed her family being brutally murdered by Russians. At the last second she manages to escape and from then on is in mortal danger. The opaque Hamid finally saves her from a fake policewoman. He poses as her father's friend to Luna and reveals to the teenager that her father was a Russian spy. Hamid actually wants to smuggle the girl into a safe country abroad, but Luna wants to hunt down the murderers of her family.

In a way, Khaled Kaissar's feature film debut is a bit plain. The bad guys look like them, the BND has a leak (who it is, the viewer knows immediately!) and Luna's grief evaporates within minutes.

Inspired by the real case of a Russian couple of agents who lived camouflaged as a family in Baden-Württemberg for twenty years and whose daughter had no idea what their parents were doing, the excellently photographed thriller focuses entirely on its leading actress and tries to find out what is going on in a 17-year-old girl whose ideal world suddenly no longer exists from one moment to the next and she turns out the previous family idyll as a lie.

Although played convincingly by Lisa Vicari, the change from insecure teenager to a self-confident young woman takes place a little too quickly - which is of course due to the grateful playing time of only ninety minutes. However, one should not overestimate all of this and rather look at Kaissar's film as a kind of finger exercise in genre cinema. And apart from some weaknesses in logic, it was mostly successful.