A young au pair disappears. Cracks spread and aquariums tremble in the pristine world of Per Fly’s masterful Netflix series Secrets We Keep.
Two ultra-wealthy, picture-perfect families. Friends and neighbours in Klampenborg’s golden enclave. Two leftover teenage boys—13 or 14 years old—hovering on the edge with a drone and a forbidden digital thread of violations. Two au pairs. One night, one of them—Ruby—vanishes without a trace. And so begins Secrets We Keep, Netflix’s most-streamed global series to date.
The coast north of Copenhagen, nicknamed the Whisky Belt—or, more acidly, The Sanctuary—is a landscape of high hedges and higher net worths. Behind security gates and perfectly clipped lawns, Denmark’s ultra-wealthy toast with vintage champagne on a Monday, and live in a permanent state of curated ease. On the outside, it’s immaculate. But inside, the aquariums start to crack.
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Marie Bach Hansen plays Cecilie with aching precision—her eyes flicker with unrest, her polished smile masking a storm of memory and moral unease.
Among the gleaming Teslas and designer prams, a silent presence hums through the streets: young Filipino women cycling quietly between homes or pushing strollers. You’ve probably seen them. But have you truly noticed them?
The hidden world of Filipino au pairs
Secrets We Keep opens a rare window into the lives of these migrant women—into their church communities, video chats home, and intimate moments of sisterhood. But it doesn’t let us off easy. Our assumptions are peeled back, our comfort zones destabilised. It’s as much about “them” as it is about “us”.
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Hansen’s Cecilie is all Scandinavian chic and sunlit poise—her honey-blonde hair as composed as her architect-designed home. A domestic aquarium where everything gleams… until a biblical downpour hits in key scenes, shattering the illusion. The cracks spread: in the glass, in the psyche. Cecilie sees more than she should, feels more than she admits. She is haunted by the past and tethered to a conscience her neighbours—and perhaps her husband, lawyer Mike—do not share.
Each evening, Cecilie runs along the shoreline. Runs, and runs. Fleeing an unnameable dread—the creeping chaos behind the curtain. The score—ambient, sacred choral voices—swells with a slow-burning paranoia. You feel it in your spine.
Lars Ranthe delivers a blistering performance as billionaire Rasmus Hoffman. Cold, controlled, casually tyrannical. When he hisses “It ends here!” to his wife in the finale, it doesn’t sound like a plea. It sounds like a verdict.
The Ice Queen and the lost boy
His wife, Katarina (Danica Curcic, deliciously diabolical), is even colder. A femme fatale carved from alabaster—calculating, self-absorbed, and terrifyingly composed.
Cecilie’s son, Viggo (Lukas Zuperka, heart-wrenching), is a ghost in his own home. Withdrawn, fragile. His deep bond with the au pair Angel (Excel Busano) pulses with ambiguity—moments so intimate they border on taboo.
Viggo’s only friend is Oscar—Katarina’s son, living across the hedge. The boys fly drones, and the whirring POV footage is pure dystopian voyeurism. They also trade stalker-style videos of unsuspecting girls. An incel narrative creeps in—raw and terrifyingly timely. Oscar leads with cruelty. Viggo follows with guilt. And that thread of digital toxicity? It might just be the key to unlocking Ruby’s fate.
Secrets We Keep earns its place among the great social-realist TV dramas of our time—equal parts seductive and disturbing.
Across six episodes, suspicion ricochets from one character to another, as it should in a proper whodunit. But Secrets We Keep isn’t here to shatter genre—its greatness lies in atmosphere and character. It seduces with style, then unsettles with substance. The sound design is witchy, precise. You feel it under your skin.
Per Fly remains one of Denmark’s great auteurs. His early-2000s trilogy—The Bench, Inheritance, Revenge—cemented his reputation for brutal, beautiful social critique. Secrets We Keep picks up that legacy. The chill of Inheritance is here again—prismatic, glacial, all-consuming. We feel the frost in our bones.
Inheritance is a hard act to follow. But Secrets We Keep doesn’t flinch. It claims its space on the top shelf of Nordic noir social dramas. The script is taut, the production exquisitely restrained, and the music—part siren song, part spectral whisper—is unforgettable.
