Anxious People (Season 1)

Anxious People (Folk med ångest, 2021) is a Swedish miniseries you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Felix Herngren and adapted from Fredrik Backman's novel of the same name.

New Year's Eve. A small Swedish town. A masked figure with a gun walks into an apartment open house and takes eight strangers hostage — then promptly disappears. The father-and-son detective duo sent to untangle the case find eight people with wildly contradictory accounts of the same afternoon, none of them entirely reliable. Dan Ekborg, Leif Andrée, Alfred Svensson and Rafaël Edholm lead the cast.

Backman's source is disarmingly gentle for a story involving a robbery and an apparent crisis — it's really a study in how loneliness and anxiety make people act in surprising, inexplicable ways. Herngren's adaptation keeps that quality intact. The mystery is almost beside the point. Stream Anxious People (2021) online on iFILM.