Families Like Ours, review: this tale of a flooded Denmark will drag you into its slipstream

Telegraph

03-05-2025

If you live in one of the ever-rising number of households designated as a flood risk then it might be handy to have a life jacket to hand when watching Families Like Ours (BBC Four). Because in this (let's hope not too) prescient drama, a whole country is going under.
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, who launched Mads Mikkelsen into the drink at the climax of his modern classic movie Another Round, is diving into deep water again here: he's asking us to ponder what would happen if a whole country has to be abandoned due to rising water levels. In Families Like Ours, Denmark is literally sunk.
It's an ingenious, if chilling, set-up. As the news of the Danish Government's decision to abandon ship and launch a repatriation programme for its six million citizens seeps out, panic understandably sets in. The border floodgates open and we meet a handful of characters struggling to keep heads above water as the world turns its back on them: Denmark, pretty quickly, finds out who its friends are.
But it's individual stories, not the bigger picture, that Vinterberg – who writes as well as directs – turns his focus on. The political issues thrown up by a country abandoning itself and creating its own diaspora are given short shrift in favour of examining the personal impact of what forging a new tribe of refugees entails.
The heart of the story is 18-year-old Laura (Amaryllis April August), whose one key mystifying decision to derail her own future in order to support her struggling mother sends ripples across Europe as she lands everyone – from her dad and his new family, to her recently met love-of-her-life – into a tailspin.
Now I'm not one to try and control the characters in TV dramas (until we get truly interactive, let's face it: it's a thankless task) but it takes a whole suspension bridge of disbelief to go with the flow of the wildly illogical choices each and every character makes here as their lives are summarily upended.
Laura's not the only one with her finger on the self-destruct button. Henrik (Magnus Millang) is another character who will have you shouting at the screen in bafflement as he repeatedly sets about detonating his marriage to husband, government official Nikolaj (Esben Smed), thanks to his outsized victim mentality.
But shouting at the screen means that, for all their inexplicable actions, these characters have a way of getting under your skin. Put yourself in their place: what would you do if you found yourself washed up on the margins of a world where any potential lifelines come swathed in choking red tape?
It's a tough question because no one comes out too well in Vinterberg's scenario. The undercurrent coursing through Families Like Ours is a sour take on humanity, a recourse to base survival instincts only occasionally sweetened by random acts of kindness.
Fascinating and infuriating in equal measure and ultimately oddly moving, for all its flaws, Families Like Ours pulls you into its emotional slipstream and won't let go.