Who Do You Believe? Inside Netflix’s ‘Die Falle’ with Friederike Becht and Isabel Kleefeld

How much of what we believe is actually true and how much is shaped by memory, manipulation and the people around us?
Netflix’s new psychological thriller Die Falle, based on Melanie Raabe’s novel, follows bestselling author Lisa Konrad, who hasn’t left her house since her sister’s murder. Ten years later, she sees a man on television whom she believes to be the killer. To expose him, she invites him into her home for an interview, planning to trap him into revealing the truth.
At its core, Die Falle questions how truth is constructed. Moving between memory and imagination, trust and suspicion, control and manipulation, it explores what happens when we can no longer trust our own perception.
These themes also reflect a recurring thread in the work of Friederike Becht and Isabel Kleefeld. Becht repeatedly plays women pushed to psychological extremes, while Kleefeld often focuses on people whose sense of security, perception or control begins to falter.
For SLEEK, we sat down at Hotel de Rome with Becht, who plays Lisa Konrad, and Kleefeld, the series’ writer and director, to talk about psychological extremes, truth and perception, manipulation and translating Lisa’s inner world from script to screen.

YASMINA ZEMZEMI What fascinates you about characters in such psychologically extreme situations? Whether in acting, or in writing and directing?

FRIEDERIKE BECHT What excites me are characters who waver and stumble rather than always standing firmly on their feet. That feels genuinely human; a person who effortlessly walks straight through life and never faces setbacks would be one-dimensional and boring.

ISABEL KLEEFELD You don’t believe in heroes. Neither do I.

FB Not to that extent. I do believe that Lisa Konrad is a heroine. That doesn’t manifest itself in “I always have it easy,” but in “I face my weakness, I face my fear, I confront it.” I find that strong. That interests me. I think it’s a fight for liberation that Lisa goes through. And I think it’s an incredibly courageous and heroic act to face yourself and also to question: Is what I remember exactly how it happened?

IK And all of that is possible within the genre of the psychological thriller. When I have the opportunity to get so deeply into another person’s head, into their thoughts and feelings, that’s what interests me. Because who wouldn’t like to be a fly on the wall inside another person’s brain? If I knew right now what you were actually thinking, what completely stressed you out an hour ago, what you dreamed about last night, what you woke up thinking about, whether you’ve already had an argument with someone today, or had a really happy moment… All of that is inside you right now. And all of that, this crawling into and this journey inside Lisa Konrad’s head, is what we tried to tell in our thriller series.

IK I found it really striking when you said earlier that the actual themes are truth, lies, manipulation, power, mistrust and also control or loss of control. And I think that’s so interesting, especially in our current time. The moment I repeat certain claims again and again and present those claims as truth, at some point people begin to perceive these suggestive claims as a kind of felt truth. And that’s something that is happening in politics right now, for example. And I find that very difficult. I would like all of us, myself included, to keep asking ourselves: What do I really know? What is actually substantiated? What is there real evidence for? And what is simply a claim? What am I being fed through news and social media? And how much of it is actually true?

YZ When you immerse yourself so deeply in a character like Lisa and learn so much about her and her psyche, do you also get to know yourself better through that process?

FB Always. Acting isn’t psychotherapy, but it is… You always experience yourself differently because you enter situations and lives that aren’t your own. Through that, you also learn something about yourself. You touch on so many different subjects that are so far removed from you and see how you would function. I always take something with me when I’m allowed to immerse myself in a role like that. I think I can even grow a little myself through the experiences a character has. In a way, I experience them too.

YZ Isabel, how do you translate the inner world of a character like Lisa into images? How do you make her emotional states, her compulsions and her altered perception tangible for the audience and translate them into a visual language?

IK Lisa can’t and doesn’t want to leave her house. She feels safe in this nest. But visually, we didn’t want to turn the whole thing into something claustrophobic, into suffering and pressure.
Instead, we created a world, the villa, where you could very comfortably spend a very long time. Visually, we tried to subtly indicate the different journeys into Lisa’s fantasy world and the world of flashbacks, memories and imaginations, through transitions. In terms of color, apart from the imaginations, we also stayed as realistic as possible. We achieved a lot also through the sound level. The moment Lisa starts writing her novel, she starts typing and we hear the internal sentences she is constructing until we are inside the situation. We used several tools to move into these different levels.

YZ You wrote Lisa and probably had an idea of her long before filming began. What is it like to eventually hand this character over to Friederike and see what she makes of her? Was there anything Friederike found in Lisa that you hadn’t seen in her yourself while writing?

IK I was allowed to take over Melanie Raabe’s conception of the character Lisa Konrad. Of course, this is my reading, my interpretation and my way of empathizing with this character. With Frida, during the second casting, the chemistry read, I felt as though someone was giving me the gift of a real interpretation and a possibility of how Lisa Konrad could truly be brought to life. It really only ever took a few thoughts between us to say: “A little more outward, a little more inward. How is she really feeling right now? What does she want to hide, what doesn’t she?” It was as if we were suddenly sitting on the same horse together. That happens when you have such similar readings that still individually add something extra to a character.

FB From the very beginning, there was this feeling that it worked well and that we understood each other easily. Understanding what the other person wants from me. You always have to look at what communication means with each individual person. We found each other very quickly in that sense.

YZ There’s this one moment where Robert Lenzen makes Lisa doubt her own perception so much that she breaks down, and then he, of all people, is the person who catches her. What actually connects Lisa and Robert, beyond the fact that they face each other as opponents?

FB They are two characters who have both constructed their worlds a little in order to survive. Lisa withdrew more and more from the outside world in order to build herself a supposedly safe home. Lenzen, too, has pieced together a truth of his own. So there are two characters who, without giving too much away, have arranged their world, their reality, their truth a little for themselves. They collide, and both let their masks fall. That’s what connects them.

IK If you imagine that the two of them were a couple and that this was a breakup scene. How often, especially in emotional dependencies and relationships, there is a kind of insidious manipulation involved, particularly in breakups. It’s also very interesting that this chess player, this strategist Lenzen, and this marathon runner Lenzen, with his immense stamina, has worked toward almost completely destroying someone, then reaching out his hand and being able to pull them back out of the hole again as the heroic helper. I found this kind of manipulation of someone who is already not in the best state incredibly interesting to watch.

YZ What does manipulation do to our trust in our own perception? How far can doubts from the outside go before we begin to stop believing ourselves?

IK The repetition of claims that are made again and again eventually leads to a kind of subjective perception where you yourself begin to think: I’m not worth it, I’m not good enough, I’m not beautiful enough, I’m not performing well enough. When that keeps coming at you from the outside, who is supposed to withstand that and still find a sense of their own worth? That’s why I always think: Just be kinder to one another.

FB What is my reality? What is my truth? What truths might I have adopted? From my mother, my father. Why do I tell myself certain things in the first place? I think that in Die Falle, Lisa wakes up. You can really only wish for every person to dare to wake up to their own thoughts, their own convictions, their own ideas of right and wrong. Does this really reflect my own convictions, or have I simply adopted them from someone else?

YZ As the screenwriter and director, you consciously control what we as an audience believe. Die Falle repeatedly plays with different leads and our expectations. How do you manage to deliberately make the audience doubt without revealing too early which version they can trust?

IK By making the other possibilities and options genuinely realistic, and also by making sure that other characters could very well have their own motivations for not telling the truth, for lying, for seeking someone’s closeness or also keeping their distance. All of it is a little more complex than simply black and white, and our lives are also much more complex than a six-part thriller series.

YZ And what makes a good misdirection for you?

IK That it is believable, that it could be continued and that it doesn’t collapse from one second to the next and turns to dust. That something of it always remains, because the story would also have worked that way in itself.

YZ Friederike, from the very beginning, you know something about Lisa that the audience only finds out at the very end. How do you prevent that knowledge from unconsciously already influencing the way you play her beforehand?

IK As Friederike Becht, she knows that. And it’s your decision that this “something” exists. There are other viewers who don’t see it that way.

FB I have a conviction. I don’t really want to say too much about it either, because in the end I hope that every viewer will want to find their own answer to it.

IK Frida sees it differently than you do and that’s how she plays it, all the way up to that point.

FB By now, it’s a mystery even to me. I’ve now watched the series for the second time and I thought, oh, maybe after all…

IK You made your declaration of faith in Lisa Konrad and stuck to it relentlessly.

FB I think I can only reveal that when we meet again next year in another interview, what I’m convinced Lisa did or didn’t do.

Die Falle on Netflix from October 13, with lead actress Friederike Becht and the series’ writer and director Isabel Kleefeld.

CREDITS

Photography by Jan Philipzen

Portraits by Lilly Wetzel

Creative Production Jule Nötzel

Concept Antonia Dipner

Photo Assistant Noah Heupel

Styling by Klaas Hammer

Hair & Make-Up Theo Schnürer

Hair & Make-Up Katharina Handel

Location Hotel de Rome