'Reservatet (Secrets We Keep)' review: Haunting Danish miniseries on Netflix tackles a rarely explored subject

Secrets We Keep takes on a rarely explored — in a serious manner, that too — subject: au pairs. Rarer still, the subject of Filipino migrants hired in the role which requires them to support a 'host family' with child care in exchange for food and accommodation and a nominal sum for personal expenses.

In Secrets We Keep, whose Danish title Reservatet refers to an Upper-Class neighbourhood north of Copenhagen, we are shown two such families from the area, with the au pairs of both sides known to each other. The hosts are affluent, living in mansions with interiors right out of the Ikea catalogue.

There is Cecile (Bach Hansen), the show's lead female protagonist, who is married to Mike (Simon Sears), an attorney employed by his industrialist neighbour Rasmus (Lars Ranthe, Mads Mikkelsen's co-star in Another Round).

Everything is tidy, polished, and eye-pleasing, but it doesn't take too long for us to get a sense of the invisible, sharply contrasting rot beneath them all. The pleasantness we see first is short-lived when Ruby, the au pair working for Rasmus and his wife Katarina (Danica Curcic, lead of the excellent Nordic series The Chestnut Man), lets Cecile know that something is not alright. And when she goes missing the very next day, both families are shaken by one unsettling development after another.

Every family member, including their male children, seems to be concealing some terrible secret. The six-episode limited series, with episode lengths ranging from 30-45 mins, moves quite in a jiffy. The atmosphere is thick with peril and malicious intent, and every new information leads us to make a certain assumption about someone in a certain episode, only to break it in the next.

The episodes are crisp, sure, but creator Ingeborg Topsøe and her efficient team of writers and directors manage to pack in enough thought-provoking twists, disquieting events, and significant character development in a short span.

The team deserves a lot of praise for handling a heavy subject with a sensitive hand and keeping the story's most disturbing or violent moments off-screen. In one mortuary scene, for instance, we are spared the image of the bloated and disfigured body of the victim because that's not how the makers want us to remember this character.

Though the Danish actors are supposed to be the "leads", it's evident that we are supposed to empathise with the Filipino characters who, I feel, get an equal amount of screen time as the others. Cecile, supposedly the so-called moral compass here, reveals herself as a disagreeable individual, to the point we are not quite sure if she deserves our full sympathy.

Certain aspects of the nature of her relationship with her husband are, at times, revealed through their complex sexual dynamics, which begin to make more sense later. The makers leave enough details to our interpretation instead of opting to spell everything out for us, at the risk of, I reckon, offending sensitive viewers who might get triggered by their own traumatic pasts. 

Series: Reservatet (Secrets We Keep)

Creator: Ingeborg Topsøe

Cast: Bach Hansen, Simon Sears, Danica Curcic, Lars Ranthe, Sara Fanta Traore

Rating: 4/5

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