The Sandells, a priori, are a more than normal family. Adam, the father, is a priest, and Ulrika, the mother, is a lawyer. They live in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Lund where they are members of the community. So, when her 19-year-old daughter Stella is arrested for murder, this idyllic facade cracks with the force of a midnight nightmare from which she cannot wake up. It's A Normal Family, the series that Netflix is banking on to keep its subscribers glued to the screen this weekend.
The corpse for which the daughter is suspected of murder is a young man with whom she had had an affair. “I liked it,” Stella admits in the images with which Netflix wanted to open the mouths of its subscribers. But as more facts are revealed, Adam and Ulrika have no choice but to ask themselves the question no parent wants to ask: could they have raised a person capable of taking a man's life?
A normal family aims to dynamite the foundations of the family and the preconceived ideas around it through social, cultural and moral values. To what extent do we know those we love and with whom we live? And how far does the duty to protect a child go? The fiction does not intend to be so much a whodunnit (that is, discover the identity of the murderer) as to know the circumstances surrounding the crime and the consequences that the murder has on the Sandells.
The series, which finished filming in September, features Alexandra Tyrefors as the main suspect and Lo Kauppi and Björn Bengtsson as her long-suffering parents. Completing the cast are Christian Fandango Sundgren and Melisa Ferhatovic. It is written by Anna Platt, writer of series such as Beck and Pray, Obey, Kill, and Hans Jörnlind, who this same year worked on the second season of Top Dog.
As is increasingly common in this type of productions, A Normal Family is based on a best-seller: An Almost Normal Family by Mattias Edvardsson, who has become a literary phenomenon in this field that is so prolific for Swedish authors, which is the genre of murders. Psychologist, Swedish teacher and also author of young adult authors, he has found his niche in his look at crime novels from psychological suspense.
In Spanish, in addition to having this story published with the title A Almost Normal Family, it has also published An Almost True Story. As a curiosity, Edvardsson, who is married and a father, lives on the outskirts of Lund.
The miniseries consists of six episodes of around 45 minutes.
