It is better

to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.  

This is roughly how the devil reasoned according to Dante: if you have now been thrown out of heaven because you could not follow the rules, you must make the best of the situation.  

It's a bit like that with Anders, the main role in Henrik Schyffert's miniseries Vi i villa.

The villa life, the chattering middle class, the meaningless work as an inspiration lecturer, the boyish paddle gang - everything he formally should want - torments him.

When his daughter Anna (Tuva Li Ramel) is bullied by the neighbor's children of the same age, he secretly begins to take revenge on his peers.  

He does

not become the devil, directly.

Anders rebels in the small things: he scratches the neighbor's car, throws dog poop on a window pane, flushes a friend's headphones down the toilet.

Rather, he is a Swedish middle-class version of Lester Burnham, Kevin Spacey's rapidly falling anti-hero in the drama film American Beauty (1999).  

But surely there is a devil there, with orchestra and everything.

In the fifth episode of the series, the Swedish death metal band Entombed's song Chief Rebel Angel thunders through the speakers when Anders necks a bottle of Prosecco on the commuter train home after a particularly unholy day at work.

Chief Rebel Angel is a hymn to the fallen angel Lucifer, the morning star, and a call to the human race to question morality and convention. 

We in the Villa is

an ambitious TV series.

Where Hans Koppel's prose in the novel on which the story is based was sparse, laconic, the series is wild and sprawling: Johan T Karlsson's apocalyptic compositions invoke the dark electronic soundscape Hildur Guðnadóttir created for the miniseries Chernobyl (2019).

Photographer Frida Wendel uses the old-fashioned 4: 3 format, which gives a feeling of walls creeping closer.

And the villa suburb itself is characterized by an eerie unreality: the grocery store in set designer Ulrika von Vegesack's interpretation is a backdrop, a Berlin TV tower looms in the background and seems to observe everything, like TJ Eckleburg's glasses in The Great Gatsby.  

All this in a story about a petty man who keys his neighbor's car during the dog walk.

There is a somewhat strange clash between the story's ambitious aesthetics and its mundane basics.

The apocalyptic sound of death has, so to speak, an obvious place in a story about a deadly nuclear reactor explosion, but becomes something else in a series about ennui in the residential suburbs. 

On the other

hand, there is nothing wrong with ambition.

Mattias Nordkvist (Our time is now, Snow Angels) rolls around in a good mood in his sweaty and immoral character and carries the story safely on his shoulders.

The scenes that make up the heart of the story, the ones between him and his daughter Anna, where the naked despair of the father's heart is exposed, are among the finest I've seen this year.  

Anders Lester Burnham or Lucifer will never be Anders, but a representative as good as anyone for the kind of meaninglessness that the self-hating middle class is so happy to end up with. 

We in villa stream on discovery + and are broadcast on Thursdays at 21 on Channel 5.