Review: Netflix's Swedish Murder Mystery, 'A Nearly Normal Family'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 12, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 12, 2023 |

I often ask myself, in the case of a mystery series like A Nearly Normal Family, if I would still like the series if it did not use multiple timelines to create suspense. In the case of this Swedish series from Per Hanefjord, I’m not so sure most of the series would have been successful without that device, save for the finale episode, which only works because I’m a sucker for courtroom trickery.

In A Nearly Normal Family, a young woman, Stella Sandel (Alexandra Karlsson Tyrefors), is arrested for the murder of the much older 32-year-old Chris Olsen (Christian Fandango Sundgren). The only thing we know about Stella at the outset is that two years prior, she had been raped by someone on whom she had a crush. She told her parents, but her mother, Ulrika (Lo Kauppi), a high-powered attorney, suggested she not report the assault to the police because the likelihood of prosecuting the rapist was low and the blame and shame Stella would experience were not worth the risk.

That decision reverberates throughout the rest of the story, both in how Stella behaves on the night Chris is murdered and in the actions of her parents, Ulrika and Adam (Björn Bengtsson), a pastor. Despite Adam’s religious background and Ulrika’s legal background, both work to cover up evidence linking their daughter to the murder by burning her clothes, tossing her cell phone, and deleting text messages. Meanwhile, in the years since the initial rape, the family has grown apart — Adam is emotionally closed off, Stella is estranged, and Ulrika has not only developed alcoholism but is having an affair.

The series thus travels along on two timelines: In the present, Adam and Ulrika try to fix their marriage and orchestrate an acquittal for Stella, who is in prison awaiting her trial. The other timeline covers the night of the murder, and as Stella’s trial grows nearer, we find out more details about the night in question.

Time permitting, I’ll dabble in Netflix’s global hits, and if it’s not a twisty Korean drama, it’s usually some Scandinavian murder show. Particularly where it concerns European series, however, most of the Netflix global shows are not that dissimilar to their American counterparts: They’re easy to binge and algorithm-friendly. Don’t be tricked by the subtitles and the dreary setting; A Nearly Normal Family is no different. It is marginally better than mediocre, but it’s also a quick binge (I watched it all in one night).

I don’t regret it, either, because once it turns to the courtroom in the final episode, it presented one of my favorite legal tricks, which it turns out can be used in Sweden as well as America.

Ending Explained — Spoilers

Welcome to those who stumbled on this post because you watched the first episode or two and decided to bail but still want to know what happens. Here’s the gist: Chris’s ex-girlfriend repeatedly warns Stella that Chris is a bad guy. Stella doesn’t buy it at first, but she starts to get the hint after Chris begins exhibiting jealous, controlling behavior.

She stops answering his calls, and Chris gets weird. On the night of his murder, Chris seeks out Stella’s best friend, Amina (Melisa Ferhatovic), who is waiting at a bar for Stella to get off work. Chris roofies Amina, takes her back to his place, and rapes her. Stella, worried that Chris lured Amina back to his place, breaks into his apartment and catches Chris sexually assaulting Amina. She tries to help Aminia escape. An enraged Chris chases them down with a knife, but he trips and drops the knife. Stella picks it up, and when Chris rushes toward her, she stabs him. Once he’s down on the ground, she stabs him several times more.

During the trial in the last episode, no one knows about Amina’s involvement except for Stella’s mom, Ulrika, the legal scholar. Ulrika disposes of Stella’s bloody clothes, her phone, and the murder weapon and hatches a plan with Amina. When the prosecutor questions Amina, she reveals that Chris raped her on the night of his murder. In doing so, Amina doesn’t admit to killing Chris but reveals that she had a motive to do so. That’s enough to provide the jury with reasonable doubt as to whether Stella murdered Chris.

It’s an old David E. Kelley trick: By convincing the jury that the murderer could legitimately be A or B, there is reasonable doubt about both A and B, and the jury can convict neither. In most courtroom dramas, guilty parties use the strategy to escape conviction. Here, the legal strategy nets a just verdict. Truthfully, I don’t know why Stella didn’t argue self-defense or justifiable homicide from the beginning, except that she didn’t think that the authorities would believe her because her parents convinced her after her first rape that the cops don’t believe women when it comes to sex crimes.

Adam and Ulrika, for the record, salvage their marriage.