Breaking Down the Gripping Ending of Netflix's Danish Crime Drama Secrets We Keep
W arning: This post contains spoilers for Secrets We Keep.
When young Filipino au pair Ruby Tan vanishes from one of Denmark's wealthiest neighborhoods, just north of Copenhagen, her neighbor Cecilie (Marie Bach Hansen) becomes convinced something is terribly wrong. Cecilie's own au pair, Angel (Excel Busano), begins digging into the rumors circulating in the gated community as suspicions of foul play mount. But the case of a missing foreign domestic worker is not a priority for local police, and newly minted investigator Aicha Petersen (Sara Fanta Traore) needs all the help she can get.
Cecilie and Angel are ready to assist, and as they do, the social structures of privilege and power that govern the elegant homes around them begin to crumble. Cecilie's commitment to finding the truth is tested when Ruby's disappearance reveals ties to her own family, forcing her to confront her blind spots and reexamine the environment in which she's raising her children.
That's the premise of Secrets We Keep (Reservatet, in Danish), a six-episode Netflix crime drama releasing on May 15. Below, we break down the gripping finale of a show that imagines the hidden darkness beneath Denmark's wealthiest enclave.
Ruby's disappearance
In Episode 1, Cecilie drives through her exclusive neighborhood and waves to a young Filipino woman throwing something in a dumpster. The woman ignores her and walks away. Cecilie's son Viggo invites his friend Oscar over for dinner that night, and Angel asks if Ruby, Oscar's family's au pair, can join too. During dinner, we realize Ruby is the woman Cecilie saw earlier, but she is puzzled when Ruby denies seeing her. Later that evening, Oscar's mother Katarina visits Cecilie, and the two chat. Before leaving, Ruby privately tells Cecilie she needs help and can't stay with Katarina's family, the Hoffmanns, anymore. Cecilie advises her to speak to her employers and insists she can't interfere in her neighbors' affairs. Ruby looks at her, pleading for help, but leaves with the Hoffmanns at the end of the evening.
The next day, Katarina arrives at Cecilie's house and asks if she's seen Ruby. According to Katarina, Ruby has disappeared. She then asks Angel if she's spoken to her, but she hasn't talked to Ruby since dinner. Cecilie asks her friend if Ruby said anything to her after dinner, and Katarina says no—she doesn't understand why Ruby would do something like this right now, with Oscar's classes starting again.
While taking Viggo to school and pushing Cecilie's young daughter, Vera, in the stroller, Angel runs into other Filipino au pairs from the neighborhood at the school gate. She asks her friends if they've seen Ruby and tells them she's gone missing, but they think—mistakenly, as we'll see—that she's exaggerating and Ruby will show up soon.
What happened to Ruby?
Over the course of the episodes, with the police already investigating Ruby's disappearance, Cecilie starts to suspect that Rasmus Hoffmann, Katarina's husband, may have something to do with the disappearance of his family's au pair. She goes to the trash bin where she saw Ruby throw something away—notably far from the house where she worked—and finds a pregnancy test on the ground. This leads her to wonder if Rasmus had gotten Ruby pregnant. She shares her suspicions with police officer Aicha Petersen, who tells her that Ruby had spoken with a couple in Holte over the summer and was supposed to start working for them after the holidays. However, that family never heard from her, so contacted the police after seeing the alert about her disappearance.
But another suspect emerges after police find Ruby's purse in a bush: Mike Winther-Jensen, Cecilie's husband. Inside Ruby's purse, police find a key card from a luxury hotel in the area. Aicha discovers that Ruby had been there with a man driving a Porsche Taycan Turbo. Very few people in the area drive that model, and only one of them has a prior rape conviction—Mike. Aicha goes to speak with the pastor of the church Ruby used to attend, convincing him that the urgency of the matter supersedes the confidentiality of Ruby's confessions. He says Ruby had come to him suspecting she was pregnant as the result of a rape. Ruby had considered having an abortion but felt she couldn't go through with it because of her faith. The pastor's questionable advice: to speak to the father of the baby, her rapist.
Ruby's body is finally found at the end of Episode 4 at a marina. At the beginning of Episode 5, Katarina asks Cecilie to identify Ruby's body in her place, saying she's not strong enough to do it. As she leaves the house, Cecilie is stopped by her son Viggo, who says he has something to tell her. She asks him to talk to her later. At the police morgue, Cecilie identifies Ruby's body, which is bloated from drowning. The coroner confirms Ruby was indeed pregnant, between five to eight weeks along, and that her body had been in the water for as long as a week, meaning she could have died the same night she ran away. Despite no clear signs of a crime, the police could still attempt to identify Ruby's rapist through DNA testing, which is exactly what Aicha sets out to do.
Aicha tries to contact Mike, to no avail, so she visits him at work. Mike claims he was at the office the night Ruby disappeared and insists he never touched her, let alone raped or impregnated her. Aicha suggests that if he wants the police off his back, he should take a DNA test, and he agrees, claiming he's innocent. Cecilie, who had also begun to suspect her husband was involved in Ruby's disappearance, reminds him after the negative results he doesn't get to play the victim—the only victim was Ruby, and she was dead.
With no new leads, Aicha's boss, Carl, begins to believe that Ruby may have committed suicide. She was raped, likely tried to speak to the baby's father, didn't want an abortion, and couldn't go back home pregnant. But Aicha doesn't believe it was suicide—the same faith that prevented Ruby from having an abortion would likely have kept her from taking her own life. Dissatisfied with the direction of the case, Aicha visits the Hoffmann home and speaks to Rasmus, who offers to pay for Ruby's body to be sent back to the Philippines. He also asks the police to publicly state that he had no involvement in the case and volunteers to take a DNA test.
In the final episode, Aicha discovers that Rasmus Hoffmann's DNA tested positive for paternity—but he's not the father. The match was only 24.1%, meaning the father was a close family member. The father of Ruby's baby was Oscar Hoffmann, the underage son of Rasmus and Katarina.
The message group and Oscar's videos
In parallel with the case of Ruby's disappearance and death, another storyline gains prominence and becomes directly connected to the au pair's fate. Oscar, Viggo, and other classmates have a messaging group where they share disturbing and pornographic content. In this group, every member is required to post something or else be kicked out. This seems like an easy task for Oscar, who is frequently seen in the series flying his drone, often filming Cecilie at home—sometimes with her noticing, other times without her knowledge. What at first appears to be 'innocent childish behavior' turns out to be deeply unsettling. Viggo clearly dislikes it but is encouraged by the other boys to share inappropriate content. He ends up filming his family's au pair, Angel, as she bends down to organize things in a cupboard. That seems to be the only time Viggo contributes to the group, and afterward, he appears weighed down by guilt. Every time he tries to talk to someone in the family, everyone is too busy to listen.
In Episode 5, Viggo's teacher asks all the students to put their phones away during class, but Viggo keeps his in hand. The teacher approaches him, takes the phone, and her tone turns serious. The boy had been watching something he wasn't supposed to, but he seems relieved that an adult is finally paying attention. Cecilie goes to the school after receiving a call from the teacher. According to the teacher, Viggo filmed his au pair naked and shared it in a group that included Oscar and other friends. He says he called the parents of the boys involved for a meeting, and at Cecilie's request, he lets her watch the video. In the recording, which is set to a remix of a song, the au pair is seen changing clothes after a shower. But the bedroom shown isn't Angel's, and the woman in the video isn't Angel either. When the woman turns toward the camera, Cecilie shocked: that is not her family's au pair.
At the parents' meeting, Katarina Hoffmann sits next to Cecilie. Another of the parents present is Dorte, the mother of Mille, a minor who was secretly filmed by Oscar. One of the other mothers accuses Viggo of filming his au pair, and Cecilie clarifies that it was Oscar's au pair in the video. After Katarina asks to see the video and watches it, she tries to minimize the situation. However, according to another mother, it's clear that Oscar is the ringleader, and the parents demand that he be expelled.
In the woods near their home, Viggo runs while Oscar chases him. When they fall to the ground, Oscar chokes Viggo and tells him not to say anything about the video he showed him—a video that wasn't shared in the group—and even threatens him: if he tells anyone, he'll die. When Cecilie gets home, she searches for Viggo until she finds him in the forest and asks what's going on. Viggo says Oscar showed him a video, one no one else saw, and that he threatened to kill him if he told anyone.
Is Oscar punished?
After Cecilie reported Oscar, the police went to the Hoffmanns' house to seize the devices Oscar had access to. However, the search turned up nothing—Katarina had already disposed of anything that could incriminate her son.
In a conversation between Mike and Rasmus at Cecilie's house, the two friends discuss the legal situation, as Mike is a lawyer and Rasmus is one of his clients. Since Oscar is under 15, he cannot be interrogated, but if the police find him guilty, it will become a case for the juvenile court. Rasmus believes the police have no grounds to charge his son with rape and that they need to make it clear to the authorities that they reject the insinuations, based on a video of Ruby undressed that he shared on the Internet. Cecilie joins the conversation, adamant that Oscar raped Ruby, but Rasmus argues that they don't know that for sure, and Viggo might be lying. In Rasmus' view, if Ruby chose to have sex with a minor, she committed the crime, and while they might have moral responsibility for what happened in their house, in this case, Oscar is the victim.
Oscar admits to Cecilie what he did to Ruby when he entered her house through the broken glass door of the kitchen. He said that he controls Ruby, that she can't say no, and that she is paid to like him. When she tells her husband Mike, the lawyer points out that without evidence of rape, the blame might fall on Ruby for having had a relationship with a minor. Officer Aicha still tries to move forward with the case, asking if Cecilie's son, Viggo, could testify against Oscar, but Cecilie refuses to put her son in that situation. From Aicha's perspective, if the neighbors were able to destroy evidence of the rape their son committed, what else might they be capable of? Still, Cecilie's response remains no.
In the final minutes of the last episode, Mike informs Cecilie and their son Viggo that Oscar will be going to a boarding school in a few days, and the Hoffmanns ask them to say goodbye to the boy. The boy, in addition to not being punished for the crime due to lack of evidence, would be going to a new school to stay away from the 'problems.' Oscar's privilege led him to believe that his au pair was practically his 'personal maid,' as his parents paid her to take care of him. And it was these privileges that resulted in Ruby's death.
Who is responsible for Ruby's death?
Just as Oscar isn't punished for raping Ruby, the person responsible for her death is also not captured, as the police continue to believe she committed suicide and have no evidence of murder. When Cecilie goes to the Hoffmanns' house before Oscar's departure, the boy appears and asks if she has heard that he's going to the boarding school. Oscar says he knows Cecilie hates him – which she denies – but claims it wasn't his mother's fault and shares that he overheard an argument between Katarina and Ruby before the latter disappeared.
With her husband and the neighbors, Cecilie decides to go to Katarina, who is on a bridge at their property. Cecilie says she thought her friend hadn't spoken to Ruby on the night she disappeared, and Katarina asks what that matters now. Cecilie wants to know if Ruby told Katarina about the rape, but Katarina simply says that they are two different kinds of mothers: while Cecilie teaches her children the importance of clearing the table after dinner, Katarina teaches her son to fight for his privileges and everything he has.
When Cecilie asks how Ruby died, Katarina questions whether she's asking because she believes Katarina killed Ruby. "What if I did?" asks Katarina, adding that "those men think everything sorts itself out."
The series' finale makes the audience question who the real culprit is and whether Ruby committed suicide or was murdered. Katarina's statement only highlights the kind of mother she is, one who fights to protect her son and the family's privileges, even though her 'invisible work' is often unrecognized by her husband. The impression is that Katarina killed Ruby, but this is never confirmed in Episode 6, and it remains just a suspicion of the public – and Cecilie.
Secrets We Keep was announced as a six-episode miniseries from the start, so it's not clear whether the series will have a new season to answer the questions that remain unresolved. We'll have to wait to find out whether Netflix will announce more episodes to address Oscar's crime and the person responsible for Ruby's death.
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