Some birthday dinners end with cake and awkward speeches. Filip’s ends with the doors sealed shut and every friendship on the table. Stormen, the Swedish dark comedy written and directed by Josephine Bornebusch, lands on Netflix worldwide on 15 October — and it has the most enviable dinner-party guest list in recent Swedish cinema.
The film opened in selected Swedish cinemas on 2 October, but the Stormen Netflix launch is the moment that puts it in front of a global audience. The setup is almost cruelly simple: Filip is turning 45 and has invited his closest friends to dinner at his and his wife’s lavish, newly bought farm estate far up in northern Sweden. Then a ferocious storm rolls in. The electricity dies. The roads disappear. Nobody can leave — and once everyone is trapped together, the polished facades start to crack, long-kept secrets spill out, and feelings nobody planned to voice take shape.
Netflix’s own synopsis puts it plainly: as panic creeps in and the guests realise how serious the situation is, the farm starts to feel smaller and smaller, and the birthday dinner turns into an unfiltered meltdown.
Josephine Bornebusch’s biggest directorial swing
Most Swedes first met Josephine Bornebusch on screen — she was Mickan in the hit comedy Solsidan, and she created and starred in the acclaimed drama series Älska mig (Love Me). But behind the camera, her résumé has been growing quietly and impressively: she directed the Netflix feature Let Go and episodes of the breakout series Baby Reindeer.
With Stormen, she does it all at once — writing, directing, and playing one of the central roles (Kina) in the ensemble. When Netflix announced the project, Bornebusch said she was thrilled by “the amazing ensemble who wanted to make this film with me – they are truly fantastic actors who have given their all to the movie” and added that “it feels exciting to do this outrageous comedy.” That excitement shows in the trailer, which has been circulating since mid-September and leans hard into the chamber-drama chaos.
The film is produced by Warner Bros. International Television Production Sweden, with Sofie Palage producing and Johan Hedman as executive producer.
A dinner table full of Swedish acting royalty
The casting is genuinely the headline here. Gustaf Skarsgård, who played Floki in Vikings, takes the lead as Filip, the birthday boy whose carefully planned evening collapses around him. Around the table sit Aliette Opheim (Caroline), Filip Berg (Ossi), Jonas Karlsson (Jakob), Johan Rheborg (Nicholas), Christopher Wagelin (Henrik), Sara Shirpey (Ninni), Gizem Erdogan, Henrik Dorsin, Nils Wetterholm and Nicole Levin — a lineup that reads like a who’s who of Swedish film and television.
Few Swedish releases this year assemble this much talent in a single room. The film leans on dialogue and the tension between its characters rather than spectacle: one night, one farmhouse, and a storm that makes the world outside irrelevant. It is the Nordic dark-comedy tradition at its most contained — funny, uncomfortable, and increasingly claustrophobic.
Stormen on Netflix: release date and what to watch next
Stormen opens on Netflix globally on 15 October 2026. And it is not the only Swedish title on the autumn slate. Netflix’s first-ever Swedish Christmas film, Bara till jul, follows on 12 November — the romantic comedy doubles as Adam Pålsson’s directorial debut and stars real-life sisters Felice and Happy Jankell. Later in the year comes Permafrost, an action comedy starring Björn Gustafsson and Aliette Opheim — who appears in both Stormen and Permafrost, making her something of this autumn’s Netflix face — about a mismatched police duo investigating an attack during Nobel Week.
Swedish audiences got a two-week head start in cinemas, but the rest of the world walks into the storm this week. If you like your comedies dark and your dinner parties explosive, clear an evening: this is the birthday you will not forget, even if Filip wishes he could.
