Barracuda Queens Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
“1995.” Four friends are having fun in Båstad, Sweden on a weekend away from their families in Stockholm. At a club, Louise “Lollo” Millkvist (Alva Bratt) has a tab running, paying for everyone’s shots. Mia Thorstensson (Tea Stjärne) and sisters Klara and Freida Rapp (Tindra Monsen, Sandra Strandberg Zubovic) are all getting drunk as skunks.
The next morning, Lollo wakes up topless on a beach next to a stranger. Klara falls asleep in a running tub, causing the bathroom to flood and leak into the hotel room below. As they leave, completely hungover, they all recall that it was quite a night.
Then the bill arrives for the water damage Klara caused: 75,000 kroner. Around the same time, Lollo gets the AMEX bill that includes a 100,000 kroner bar tab. Even though Lollo and Klara’s parents have the money to easily cover these bills, they both know that they’ve taken full advantage of that in the past and that tap’s run dry. They’ll somehow have to pay those bills themselves.
At a cocktail party thrown by Lollo’s parents, the girls all try to figure out how to get the money, though Mia, who lives with her mom and cleans houses owned by leering rich guys, feels she shouldn’t chip into the cost of the last bacchanal. Lollo’s mom Margareta (Izabella Scorupco) introduces the girls to Amina Khalil (Sarah Gustafsson), who moved in nearby with her family; Margareta calls them the “Barracuda Queens”, an old “secret” name they had for themselves when they used to part on nearby Barracuda Beach.
During the party, Klara sees a Rolex on a tray in the bathroom and, in desperation, decides to pocket it. After she gets suspended from law school when she gets caught cheating on an exam, she goes to pawn the Rolex and her own watch; she only gets 15,000 kroner total. But when Lollo mentions that their maid got fired because the watch went missing, Klara admits she swiped it.
That gives Lollo an idea; she knows Amina’s parents are loaded, and Amina mentioned that they were all going to a wedding in Cairo that weekend. So the four girls decide to break in and steal some of their stuff; Klara and Lollo are doing it to pay those debts, Mia is doing it so she doesn’t have to get ogled by perverts when she cleans homes, and Freida is just going along for the ride. The plan almost works until they go into Amira’s bedroom and see that she’s still at home, sleeping. When she wakes up, they all run.
Creator Camilla Ahlgren based Barracuda Queens on a true story, but the production notes for the show say that it’s very loosely based on that story, so we’ll take the fictional version without referring to the actual events. The reason why we mention this is that no one in this “girl gang” is painted in a sympathetic light, and that’s appropriate, given how much privilege they have.
After the first episode, they all pretty much look like just that: A group of young women who decide to steal from other rich families in order to pay for the debts they’ve incurred from their partying ways. By the second episode, however, not only is Amina helping them out — she’s studied art and has dealers that can fence stolen goods for quick cash — but the group now has a purpose: To steal from the rich assholes that have wronged them. It could be from the family whom Mia cleaned houses for, or it could be from the family of Tobias (Christian Fandango Sundgren), a friend of Lollo’s brother Calle (Max Ulveson) that blew Lollo off after sleeping with her.
Here’s the thing, though: We don’t know if this makes the Barracuda Queens any more sympathetic. They’re not teenagers, they’re adults, and their purpose still doesn’t cover up the fact that they started doing this to cover their partying ways. The idea over the series’ six relatively brief episodes is that they’re going to somehow do this while keeping up appearances, but eventually get caught, as we see in the in medias res opening. We imagine that, not being master burglars, they’re going to arrogant and careless. In fact, at the end of the second episode, there’s already evidence of that.
All that being said, the performances by the five young women in the lead are all pretty well done, the parents are only depicted as mildly clueless rich d-bags (or in the case of Mia’s mom Cecilia (Michaela Thorsén) open to having some fun of her own), and the episodes go by in a breezy fashion, with plenty of mid-’90s needle drops on the soundtrack.
So this begs the question: Can we tolerate a show about this group of overprivileged young women robbing other overprivileged people if it moves by quickly and has songs like Supergrass’ “Alright” on the soundtrack?
