Snow Angels

A very realistic series about a number of bad decisions in your life, unwilling criminals and innocent victims. The actors' and actresses' play is as usual in the Swedish, Danish films, outstanding. As much as we don't want to notice and acknowledge...life is more than black and white.

One of the best tv shows I've seen in years, Snow Angels (on UK's All-4 streaming service) is the 6-art account of the disappearance of an infant child and the sympathetic scrutiny of his shocking family life. A drug-addicted mother and a reformed addict father, who is heroically loyal to her, struggle to cope with the arrival of a second child into their hand-to-mouth existence. Meanwhile we follow the trials of a maternity care nurse whose job it is to make evaluations of the ability of new parents to cope. How will these two harrowing narratives intersect?

Snow Angels is a difficult but compelling watch, tender and sad, shocking and utterly involving. A series that goes where most others, for all their shock and gore and posturing, would fear to tread.

Highly recommended.

This is one of the few Scandinavian series when viewers can see that so-called native local people can also live in poverty and misery (usually this is visible when depicting post-1990 immigrants). The situations are both tragic and somber, and intertwining 3 cases and multiple characters provides additional value to the series. True, the potential wrongdoer as to the baby is somewhat revealed too soon (in spite of somewhat artificial distractions), but the real circumstances remain mystery up to the end. All the scenes are accentuated by harsh weather conditions and gray winter sky = climate is a strong supporting cast here.

The performances are also okay, with many faces not visible in every Swedish-Danish series :) Well, Eva Melander is a kind of star in Scandinavia, but Maria Rossing was a pleasant surprise, previously unknown to me.

Thus, Snöanglar is a solid series, yet not Innan vi dör or Bron/Broen, and with certain triviality in depicting police officers, particularly headstrong ones...

There have been many series about children who are missed, which is also the main event here. We follow a young couple with many challenges in everyday life who experience all parents' nightmares, their baby disappears. The series is good at unraveling both incidents in advance and the investigation that is launched. I get a little frustrated that some episodes were largely about prehistory after we are introduced to the disappearance. Maybe the series could have been shortened somewhat, and instead concentrated only on the disappearance? On the other hand, it is also about the difficult social conditions the main characters have, and other characters are also carefully presented. This provides a rich gallery of characters, and gives us viewers more hints about what may have happened. This makes the series exciting to follow. After watching this series, I think the creators have succeeded in creating an exciting series, with a dark backdrop that provides an insight into a gloomy everyday life and dysfunctional environments in which the main characters live their lives. The revelation about what happened is well made and in my opinion surprisingly good.

This was a hard watch: a poor struggling family, cynical cops, overwhelmed social services, abandoned children. Yikes!

Doesn't sound like much of recommendation but if you have the stomach for it, it is a powerful and human story dramatized and made all the more real by some truly superb acting. You fluctuate one moment from deeply disliking some of the characters to their breaking your heart in the next, from everyone seeming guilty to everyone's just a tragic victim.

The actor who plays Samir, the baby's dad, gave one of the most incredible performances I've ever seen, and the actor who played Jenni, his wife, as well.

Like I said, it's a hard story to watch, but the performances alone pull you in and make it worth it.