Ängelby

After completing the 12 episode series, I found the show completely captivating to the point that I looked forward to each episode. The locations are all quite rich with detail and age which lends an air of reality to the show and characters that most shows just don't have. You won't find any sterile set locations here. The people are all quite exquisitely eccentric but in a way that makes sense by the end of the run. Then there is the main story. Everyone has their own unpredictable motivations. To me, unpredictability in story telling makes for a much more enjoyable experience and this is one of the few shows I couldn't guess the end, and I loved it for that. Still, unpredictability can come from bad places sometimes, but this isn't one of those. No, rather this is the type of show where it may be hard to guess... but it all makes some level of sense due to clues weaved into the show.

So my recommendation is to give this a chance. Just don't go into it expecting some kind of horror story or something with monsters or other unrealistic things. It's firmly a drama rooted in reality with the threat of mysticism. I say "threat" because for the majority of the show you are left to decide what if anything to believe. You can be like me and stay completely grounded in reality and believe there is an explanation for everything... or buy into it all. Either way, I think the show wraps itself up quite nicely in an oddly satisfying manner.

As an added bonus for people from other countries, there is interesting architecture, beautiful nature, and other visual treats to enjoy. When watching foreign shows myself, I tend to really get a kick out of seeing different ways of life. Like the oddity of doors that open outward. On American shows typically if a door opens outward its because of bad set design... here, it's the reality of the environment. Enjoy!

Unusual topic, interesting location, imperfect characters, doesn't follow the usual, predictable Hollywood playbook. Worth a look.

Like Haven it's a new girl in a country town apparently by chance but occultly predestined to be there and supernatural forces are thought to be at work. There's less of the concretely reified majic than Haven shows and less episodic storylines but it would seem to be derivative, not helped by the fact that Mia Skaringer looks like an older Emily Rose. But it's watchable and entertaining if you can binge-watch it. It's probably more for "Nordic Noir" fans than those of standard mystery series.

What an absolute load of rubbish and a total waste of time watching this series: messy, unfathomable plot, unrealistic characters... The list goes on. Actors were pretty OK, but their roles were not. If this series was intended to be a fairytale, it failed. A drama it was clearly not. I don't know what it was, but not a good reason to spend 12 hours of one's life watching it. There seems to be a trend in Swedish TV-series presently - similar fantasy elements could be detected in another recent TV-show from Sweden, namely Jordskott. One can not but compare these two and wish, enough already! Fairy tales for adults don't work unless they are perfectly written or unique.

Although I am not too keen on series-films dealing with supernatural phenomena, I like Scandinavian Noir, plus I got to know that the supernatural does not dominate here. So I decided to let it go... Well, the start was rather slow and arid and I recognised a few familiar actors only, but then it was some "kick" and I became curious what had and would really happen. To me, the episodes in the middle were the most interesting, with some twists and teasing endings in each episode, but the final ones became too slow, and the very ending was not gratifying either. There were also scenes where the references to the past and actual events remained vague, i.e. a kind of over- sophistication took place.

As for the characters and performances, the leading ones did not impress me much (I was surprised to read later that Mia Skäringer is so famous in Sweden), but Michaela Thorsén as Viveka Wallström made me often giggle.

Thus, Ängelby is not a conceptual creation, but if you like Swedish lifestyle and way of thinking, and some mysticism in a "plain" crime, then you spend good 9 hours of your life in front of TV. Most similar U.S. series are worse anyway...