About Families Like Ours
Families Like Ours, known in Danish as Familier som vores, is a 2024 Danish drama and the television debut of director Thomas Vinterberg. Set in a near future that looks almost exactly like the present, the series opens as a steadily rising sea forces Denmark to confront a decision no modern nation has had to make: the country can no longer be kept safe and dry, and the authorities resolve to evacuate the entire population and dissolve the state in an orderly way. There are no monsters and no sudden catastrophe here, only paperwork, queues, and the quiet arithmetic of where each person will be allowed to go.
Against this backdrop the story follows one ordinary family as the evacuation pulls them apart. Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays Jacob, a father trying to hold his loved ones together as borders harden and resources thin, while Amaryllis August plays his teenage daughter Laura, whose coming of age is reshaped overnight by the loss of home and certainty. As parents, partners, and children are routed toward different countries, the family becomes a scattering of climate refugees across Europe, each member negotiating new languages, host bureaucracies, and the daily indignities of being a newcomer who is wanted in principle and unwelcome in practice.
Vinterberg frames the drama with restraint and a literary patience, treating displacement not as spectacle but as a test of love, loyalty, and identity. The series asks what a family owes one another when staying together is no longer possible, and what dignity can survive when the ordinary scaffolding of a life is removed. Humane rather than alarmist, Families Like Ours uses its speculative premise to hold a mirror to the present, inviting Danish viewers to imagine themselves on the other side of a border they have only ever watched from a distance.
