Anyone still mourning the end of Killing Eve may find macabre comfort in Kleo (Netflix), an intriguing assassin revenge thriller from Germany with a Villanelle-style preference for violence with a strong aesthetic. Jella Haase is Kleo Straub, an unregistered agent for a top secret Stasi department whose main job is to nip from East Berlin to West to eliminate enemies of the state.
At first, it seems as if the series might have also borrowed that distinctive Killing Eve sense of humour. It begins in 1987, as Kleo picks her way through the sewers of Berlin, offering a gift to a rat she has nicknamed Comrade Lenin. She makes her way to a neon-lit nightclub with a knife tucked into her suspenders, and locks eyes with her target across the dancefloor. It is high-energy, breathlessly gruesome and early proof that Kleo is incredibly efficient at what she does, which is ruthlessly getting rid of whomever the state tells her is next. “The Wall will come down before she screws up,” says one character, not so much dropping a trail of breadcrumbs for the viewer as leaving the entire loaf behind.
