“A New Summer”: Lies, Secrets and Class Barriers

When Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) was still sleepy early in the morning on her wedding day, walking a few meters from her future in-laws’ summer residence to the beach on Nantucket, a chic island in the US state of Massachusetts, she suddenly saw a lifeless body floating in the water . When she realizes who the dead woman is and how much she means to her, she panics. Only at the end of the first episode does the puzzling viewer find out who actually died.

But with this game of hide-and-seek, the star-studded and lavishly produced six-part Netflix series “A New Summer” sets its own idiosyncratic narrative mode. “A New Summer”, the adaptation of the novel “The Perfect Couple” (2018), which has not been translated into German, by Elin Hilderbrand, who herself lives on the island of Nantucket, is a complex crime story full of surprising twists and turns from the milieu of the upper ten thousand.

Even though “A New Summer” is designed as a classic crime thriller, this story is staged like a puzzling puzzle due to its non-linear narrative style.

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The Winbury family owns a large estate on Nantucket Beach, where the rich and famous reside. The wedding of son Benji (Billy Howle) with Amelia, who comes from a humble background, is about to be celebrated when the dead woman is found and numerous guests have already arrived over the weekend. Was it an accident or even murder?

Much to the Winburys’ dismay, Police Chief Dan Carter (Michael Beach) and Inspector Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) soon investigate the case and, after the wedding has been canceled, question family and guests one by one. Mother Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) is a successful best-selling author and is about to publish a new book, so while the police investigation is still ongoing, journalists arrive to do a home story about the family.

Husband Tag (Liev Schreiber), who has one affair after another and always puts on a good face when dealing with evil, sits on the beach all day smoking weed. The sons Thomas (Jack Reynor), Benji and young Will (Sam Nivola), who is having a romantic tête-à-tête with the daughter of the black police chief, are in a constant clinch and sometimes hit each other. Friends of the family who live in the guest houses on the seaside property are also invited. The number of possible suspects is therefore large and with the ongoing investigation it is clear that there are many motives for a possible murder.

Even though “A New Summer” is designed as a classic crime thriller, this story is staged like a puzzling puzzle thanks to its non-linear narrative style with numerous flashbacks and many hints. Only very slowly do the various, extremely cleverly interwoven storylines between interrogations at the police station, events from the day before the planned wedding, the ongoing investigations and lots of flashbacks, some of which go far into the past, begin to make sense.

Everyone present has their little and big secrets. There are a lot of corpses in the basement of the wealthy Winbury family. It’s about secret love affairs, expensive jewelry, hurt feelings, jealousies and, above all, class barriers that are difficult to overcome.

The Winburys are prototypes of enlightened, super-rich East Coast Americans. One day when the young Will Winbury climbs through the window into the room of his lover Chloe (Mia Isaac), her father, the police chief, catches him and shouts angrily: “Your family doesn’t own the whole island. This is my house!” Will’s brother Thomas, an arrogant creep, threatens the investigating officers that he will cut the family’s annual Christmas check for the police station if their cars continue to block the driveway. The further the story develops, the more important these class differences become, for the almost proletarian officials Dan Carter and Nikki Henry as well as for the numerous guests and the bride and her parents.

Available on Netflix