Your country is sinking. This alarming Danish drama asks what you would do

The Age

17-06-2025

FAMILIES LIKE OURS ★★★★
Denmark is sinking. That's the alarming – and not entirely implausible – premise of this seven-part, Danish-language drama that imagines a new kind of climate refugee for the privileged First World: families, as the title implies, like ours.
Conceived by Thomas Vinterberg, whose 2020 black comedy Another Round earned him the honour of becoming the first Danish director to score an Oscar nomination, Families Like Ours premiered at last year's Venice International Film Festival. It's an absorbing pre-apocalyptic study in how an impending national crisis affects people on a macro level. What happens to the relationships within one extended family placed under this kind of existential panic is at once fascinating and disturbing, prompting self-reflection on the hypothetical limit of one's own loyalties when faced with the imminent prospect of survival.
The impending doom is signalled up front, with the opening scene flashing forward six months to the Copenhagen docks, where a sea of mostly flaxen-haired people jostle for position on vessels evacuating their homeland, soon to be underwater due to melting ice caps. Following 'Danish due diligence', it is wryly noted, the nation is taking pre-emptive action following the economic collapse of another low-lying country, the Netherlands. So we know full well what is coming when, transported back to the brink of this catastrophe, the whispers begin.
Laura (Amaryllis August) and Elias (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt) embody the tragedy of such a life interruption on the youth. Part of the last graduating class of Gammel Hellerup High School, they are the innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control, of a war with nature they didn't start that is destroying their hopes and dreams at the very moment the world should be their oyster. Theirs is a different time, and their enemy is environmental forces, but there are echoes of similarly cursed sweethearts throughout literature and history, in their connection and optimism, when circumstances could not be more hopeless.
Through Laura's uncle, Nikolaj (Esben Smed), a government official married to Henrik (Magnus Millang), a select few in the family are forewarned. Henrik's odious and homophobic brother represents the worst of panicky desperation, his initial response casting him as an early villain. Laura's architect father, Jacob (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), scrambles to secure work in Paris, becoming one of many respected professional Danes suddenly stripped of credentials and confidence.
Loading
As the inevitable shutdown of the country nears, life goes on as normally as possible. The final summer in Denmark bathes the characters and their homes in a thin light. A young boy with a talent for soccer sees something more in the puddles on the pavement. In line with Vinterberg's commitment to cinematic realism, surreal sequences are restricted to Laura's dreams in soft focus, of Elias, and of water gently flowing across the carpet.