Netflix's Secrets We Keep ending explained: What happened to Ruby and the au pair?
Secrets We Keep is Netflix’s latest gripping crime-thriller about the dark secret behind a young woman’s mysterious disappearance.
Secrets We Keep, Netflix’s latest gripping crime-thriller, is a tale of privilege and wealth as much as it is a reflection on the troubles teenagers face in the digital age of easy access to illicit content. With a remarkable ability to keep its audience guessing till the last second, the dark secret behind a young woman’s mysterious disappearance leaves viewers with more shock than satisfaction.
(Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead)
Setting up the background
When young Ruby (Donna Levkovski) arrives at the home of the affluent family of Katrina (Danica Curcic) and Rasmus (Lars Ranthe), her au pair role soon begins to demand more than what she signed up for. After being overlooked in an attempt to share her concerns with the couple’s neighbor Cecilie (Marie Bach Hansen), Ruby disappears from the affluent neighborhood the very next day.
Cecilie, wrapped in guilt over ignoring Ruby’s call for cry, takes the painstaking effort to uncover the mystery of her disappearance. However, what she discovers in the process makes her question the very environment they’re raising their family in. Her doubts and suspicions only become more complicated when Ruby’s body is discovered a week later which reveals that she had been five to eight weeks pregnant by then.
Who was the father? Was it suicide or murder? The only thing known for sure: foul play was involved.
Pointing the finger of blame on Rasmus? …or Mike?
The first and most obvious suspect in the case is the man with a reputation for arrogance, privilege and indifference: Rasmus. With lack of proof on this count, it doesn’t take long for the finger of suspicion to soon point to Cecilie’s own husband Mike (Simon Sears) who is revealed to have had a history with sexual assault. The mysterious messages with Ruby on his phone and secret meetings in the middle of the night are no assets to Mike’s pleads for innocence.
However, a DNA test soon eradicates both these suspects of fathering Ruby’s unborn child. Plot twist? The 24.1% match with Rasmus proves it’s one of his close relatives.
Ignoring the tell-tale signs
So, who not only fathered Ruby’s unborn child but also raped her in the process of doing so? Rasmus and Katrina’s underage son Oscar (Frode Bilde Rønsholt).
A parallel plotline reveals that teenager Oscar and his “boy gang” have a secret group chat meant to share illicit videos of women, often featuring them naked. Cecilie’s son Viggo (Lukas Zuperka) is also forcibly a member of the chat and is repeatedly ignored in his attempts to express concern about the kind of content circulated by his peers. This revelation also takes viewers back to a moment where Oscar had supposedly choked Viggo in order to ensure his silence about a video shown in confidence; a video shot from the nanny cam in Ruby’s room that captured her assault.
Despite all the dots matching to point at Oscar, the young boy still manages to escape accountability and gets sent to a boarding school instead. How? All thanks to his mother.
How Katrina got her hands dirty
The show makes its most relevant point not in revealing Oscar as the father and culprit of Ruby’s assault but by depicting his mother as the one who erased all relevant evidence implicating her son be it removing the nanny cam from Ruby’s rooms or erasing the video on her son’s phone. Her actions expose Ruby to character assassination by showing her as someone who had sexual intercourse with an underage boy rather than revealing the hidden dark truth.
What’s more? The series ends on a cliff-hanger which suggests that Katrina may have been the one to not only implicate Ruby but also murdered her. After initially denying having any conversation with her au pair on such matters, the final dialogue between her and Cecilie indirectly points the needle in a different direction.
The worst part? Neither her nor her son might face any legal implications for their actions. All thanks to the immense stature and power they hold.
Secrets We Keep is not your run-of-the-mill whodunnit mystery. It points out larger gaps in the social fabric of class and privilege to talk about why people choose to engage in actions that should implicate them ..… but never do.
By Stuti Gupta
