NO ANGEL (INGEN ÄNGEL) Review: Blood, Violence, Dark Humor, and Blessed Brevity

Imagine a teenage female serial killer.

No Angel (Ingen Ängel)
The series premieres Thursday, July 6, exclusively on the Viaplay streaming service. I've seen all four episodes.

Angelina is 17, dresses boldly in pink, and sticks up for her friends, even if she has to kill to defend them.

Created by EliSophie Andrée, Angelina, or Angie as she's known, is played by Yussra El Abdouni with a bouncy swagger. She's in command of every situation and completely self-assured and confident.

She strides down school hallways, assured that every eye that is cast upon her is a jealous eye, save for her best friend, Fanny (Felicia Sjöström Nilsson). In Angie's eyes, Fanny is a lovely person, loving and loyal, except that she is somewhat dim and has bad taste in boyfriends.

For reasons that escape Angie, Fanny is fixated upon an athletic beau named Jesper (Edvard Olsson), who is more popular than she is and much less caring about her personal feelings. He thinks of Fanny as a body, nothing more, a vessel to be used by him as he chooses, to be cast aside at his pleasure.

Angie is infuriated by Jesper's attitude because she knows that Fanny deserves much better than the likes of him. When Fanny persists in her adolescent yearnings, Angie steps in to deal with what she perceives to be a big problem.

Really, though, at the heart of it, the problem lies with Angie. She is so deep into her own bad self that she believes she knows what is best for everyone around her, and that she is the only one who can fix the troublesome issues that surround her and those she loves.

Angie acts as though everything is fine, even though, as she unreliably narrates, her father is recently dead from cancer and her mother (Bahar Pars) is an alcoholic. In her colorfully pragmatic fashion, she dearly loves her younger sister Alva (Miryam Eriksson), who, in turn, dearly loves her hamster, Preben, and where is all this going?

Created by EliSophie Andrée, the series swiftly introduces each of its characters, plugging them into a narrative that moves briskly through its four episodes, each running 17-20 minutes, to tell a vivid tale, filled with bright colors and punchy action, punctuated by bursts of social media activity that supplies an undercurrent of whirling motion. It's energetic and flashy

No Angel also knows when to exit stage left and get out of Dodge. Before you know it, it's done, leaving a wonderfully fizzy aftertaste.

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