Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Nearly Normal Family’ On Netflix, Where A Family’s Secrets Come Out When The Daughter Is Accused Of Murder

We have watched more than enough TV to know when a show is setting us up. We know when we’re getting information withheld from us on purpose in order to prolong a series’ central mystery and we always feel like we’re being taken for a ride that will involve a lot of misdirection, events that will seem like explanations but really are red herrings, and other storytelling gymnastics. So we appreciate it when a thriller structures its storytelling in a way that minimizes the chance of that happening.

A NEARLY NORMAL FAMILY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of a woman rubbing her hands. A woman says, “Sounds like you have a complicated relationship with your parents. Has it always been this way?” The woman’s expression is full of pain.

The Gist: We cut to that same woman, Stella Sandell (Alexandra Karlsson Tyrefors), looking a little younger, going off to training camp with her handball teammates. Her parents — Adam (Björn Bengtsson), a priest, and Ulrika (Lo Kauppi), a lawyer — are hugging each other as they see her get into the bus. Stella sits next to her best friend Amina Besic (Melisa Ferhatovic), and they both longingly look at the handsome new addition to the club, Robin (Christoffer Willén), who is helping coach the girls’ team.

During camp, there’s an obvious attraction between Stella and Robin; she proposes they go for a swim after one practice. They take a dip in the cold water, and they start to move toward each other when they realize how out in the open they are. They go to a nearby cottage and start making out. But when Robin wants to do more, Stella tells him to stop. But he keeps going.

After the two of them are discovered in the cabin, Stella is sent home. Shaken up, she tells her parents about the assault. Adam is insistent that they report it, but Ulrika disagrees, especially after an exam doesn’t show any physical evidence. It’s not that she doesn’t believe her daughter, but her experience tells her that pressing charges will lead to an invasive and personal investigation that will traumatize Stella even more.

Four years later, Stella is celebrating her 19th birthday. Her dad is excited to give her a scooter for her to get around, but Stella wanted money to go towards the travel she was planning to do. She goes out with Amina to a club, but soon finds herself alone when Anima runs into college friends — given that Stella isn’t in school, she finds she doesn’t have a lot in common with them. She sees a guy outside and finds out he’s going to an art show in Copenhagen, about an hour away from where they are in Lund, Sweden. On a lark, she asks to go with him and they have a fun night. She and Christoffer Olsen (Christian Fandango Sundgren) finally introduce themselves when he drops her off the next morning.

Six weeks later, we then see things from both Adam’s and Ulrika’s perspectives. Adam finds himself alone at home one night when Stella is out and Ulrika says she has to go to work unexpectedly. But when Adam sees Ulrika’s ID badge left behind in the kitchen, he knows something else is up. Late that night, he’s surprised to hear Stella in the downstairs sauna, clutching clothes with blood on them. The next morning, after a pickleball match with Amina’s parents, Adam comes across a crime scene on the way to his church; apparently, someone was murdered.

Then we see what Ulrika was doing that night; she was having sex with Mikael Blomberg (Håkan Bengtsson), a fellow attorney. The next day, after arguing with Stella about her missing phone, she expresses to Amina’s mother Alexandra (Sara Chaanhing Kennedy) that she’s disappointed that Stella has chosen not to go to college. Then she gets a call from Mikael; Stella has been arrested, accused of murdering a man named Christoffer Olsen. She tells Mikael that the name isn’t familiar to her. He warns her that the police are on their way over to search the house, which prompts her to find a bag full of blood-stained clothes under Stella’s bed and put it in a handbag, which she takes with her when the police take her in for questioning.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Nearly Normal Family, based on the book of the same name by Mattias Edvardsson, definitely has the feeling of Safe and other thrillers that Netflix has made from Harlan Coben’s novels.

Our Take: What distinguishes A Nearly Normal Family from other “families with secrets” thrillers is that it circles through the perspectives of all three members of the Sandell family. What we don’t know by the end of this first episode is if Stella actually murdered Christoffer or not. She could be falsely accused, or she could have done it. We’re also not sure what either of her parents know or don’t know about Christoffer’s murder.

However, instead of covering up the details we’re going to eventually find out about using red herrings and other tried-and-true narrative tricks, the story shifts perspective. This way we see how every member of the Sandell family experiences this turn of events and how what comes out of the investigation shakes up their family unit from those different points of view. It’s not a novel way to tell this kind of story, but it’s used to good effect here.

What we also don’t know is what the sexual assault Stella experienced when she was 15, and her family’s lack of response to it, will play out four years later. It seems that a rift occurred in the ensuing four years, not just between Stella and her parents but between Adam and Ulrika. Will we see how the assault affected things, or how that might have changed how Stella reacts in certain situations? We hope that’s the case.

Sex and Skin: There’s simulated sex in the first episode, but not as much nudity as you might think.

Parting Shot: As we see Ulrika trying to get in touch with Adam, who’s presiding over a christening, Stella is given a prison uniform, led to a cell, and locked up.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Björn Bengtsson as Adam, because he certainly portrays Stella’s dad as a guy who knows he’s being cheated on and who has lost touch with his daughter. But there also seems to be more to him than meets the eye.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Stella is out with Chris in Copenhagen, they meet a drag queen at a club, and Stella asks if they can switch dresses. And somehow the drag queen’s dress fits her perfectly, despite the fact that they seemed to be a foot apart in height.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While it progresses a bit slowly, we appreciate the storytelling structure of A Nearly Normal Family, which should reduce the chances of eye-rolling plot points and red herrings as we get closer to finding out what really happened.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.