TV-Show Review - En Helt Vanlig Familj (A Nearly Normal Family)

Season: Mini Series
Genre: Drama/ Crime/ Thriller
Number of episodes: 6
Year: 2023
Starring: Alexandra Karlsson Tyrefors, Björn Bengtsson, Lo Kauppi, Christian Fandango Sundgren, Melisa Ferhatovic, Hakan Bengtsson

Description: The world of a seemingly perfect family shatters when a shocking murder proves that they’re willing to make desperate moves to protect one another.

Review: In the six-part Swedish miniseries “En helt Vanlig Familj” (A Nearly Normal Family), a ‘perfect’ family is rudely torn apart when the daughter of the house is suspected of murder. The series cleverly shows how much pain lies behind a cheerful family portrait.

If the picture is to be believed, mother Ulrika, father Adam and daughter Stella form a model family. Mother is a successful lawyer, father an esteemed priest, and their daughter also seems to be quite stable in life. But that cheerful picture turns out to be especially misleading, because at the end of the first episode, Stella is arrested on suspicion of murdering a man. Suddenly, very little remains of the façade of the idyllic family.

And it remains to be seen if this murder she allegedly committed actually came out of nowhere, or if there is more at play. After all, we already learned in the opening scene that Stella is weighed down by considerable trauma, which happened four year prior. At the time, Urika did not think it make sense to press charges: there was no evidence and a trial could have done Stella more harm. So they decided to put the matter to rest.

But now, four years later, the parents must once again face a terrible thing happening with her daughter. Was them keeping what happened to Stella all those years ago the reason for these current events? Adam and Ulrika are working together to get their daughter back. And the way they react now is also a reaction to their earlier apathy.

The details are kept deliberately vague for a long time, so that it is only in the closing minutes that we discover what really happened on the night of the murder. That makes for an exciting series. We see the story from the perspective of all three family members. It might not be the most original and groundbreaking story, but it’s an engaging murder mystery from the lives of a seemingly perfect family. And I highly enjoyed it.