Directed by Amanda Adolfsson, Barracuda Queens is set in the mid-nineties, when a group of girls decide to commit a burglary to repay a huge debt that had been incurred because of their reckless behavior. It didn’t take long for the act of compulsion to become a habit, and soon, even the law enforcement authorities got a whiff of it. Barracuda Queens is loosely based on real-life events that happened in the 1990s in Sweden, where a group of men started committing burglaries in a wealthy neighborhood called Djursholm. So, let’s find out what the girls were up to and if the police were ever able to catch them.
Spoilers Alert
‘Barracuda Queens’ Plot Summary: What Is The Series About?
Louise, Klara, Frida, and Mia were on vacation, but things went a bit out of hand, and they ended up doing things that got them into huge trouble. After a fun night, they realized that they had caused a lot of damage to the hotel they were staying in. There was water leakage because Klara passed out in the bathtub with the taps open, and additionally, Louise’s credit card was maxed out, and the girls didn’t remember how they ended up splurging so much. The hotel gave them a bill of approximately $175,000, and they had no clue how they were going to pay such a huge amount. Apart from Mia, all the other girls came from wealthy backgrounds, but still, justifying to their parents why they were in such a mess was a huge task. Louise, a.k.a. Lollo, was the most composed one, probably because her family was the wealthiest of the lot, but even she knew that they would have to find some solution sooner rather than later if they didn’t want things to get out of hand and their parents to get involved in the entire facade.
Margareta, Lollo’s mother, had an expensive watch that went missing all of a sudden, and she fired the maid, presuming that she might have stolen it. But in a turn of events, we got to know that it was one of the Barracuda Queens who was behind it, and the poor maid had been wrongly blamed. It was Klara who had stolen the watch, and she confessed to it and told Lollo and others that she was naive to do so, as she thought that she would be able to pawn it and get some money to repay a part of the huge debt that they had on their heads. It felt like her confession opened a new stream of thought, and Lollo got an idea that could actually help them repay the amount they owed to the hotel. Recently, at a party organized at Lollo’s house, they were introduced to a girl named Amina, who had moved to the neighborhood and also came from a privileged background. While having a conversation, Lollo got to know that Amina’s family was going to Cairo the coming weekend, and she wanted to take advantage of it. Lollo proposed to the group that they break into Amina’s house to steal whatever they could get their hands on.
The girls were skeptical at first, but then they gave in, considering that otherwise, their parents would get involved, and they would have to bear the consequences, which they were clearly not okay with. The Barracuda Queens were on their way to committing their first burglary, but they had no clue that they were in for a surprise. They went inside Amina’s house and found that, though her parents had left, she had decided to stay back. The girls got startled, and they immediately ran away from the scene. For the next few days, the girls were extremely scared and apprehensive, as they believed that Amina would inform the police about them, and they would be charged with the crime. But nothing of the sort happened, and Amina never told anybody what she had seen that night. The girls confessed as they didn’t understand what was brewing inside Amina’s mind, but things started becoming clearer once Amina expressed to Lollo why she had not revealed anything to the police.
Why Did The Girls Keep Stealing?
Amina found the idea of breaking into someone’s house quite thrilling, and she told the girls that she would love to be a part of their group. After Amina came on board and joined the clan, they decided to rob Tobias’s house next, as Lollo had a personal vendetta against him. Lollo really liked Tobias, and after they became intimate one night, she believed that he too had feelings for her and that they could have something substantial between them, but Tobias had no such intention, and he was merely taking advantage of the girl as he knew that she was attracted to him. When Tobias didn’t call Lollo after spending the night together, she decided to go to his house and find out why he was being so aloof. Tobias acted very rudely, and in a demeaning tone, he told Lollo that he could never date a girl like her. Lollo felt used, and that is why she wanted to take revenge on him. They stole a very expensive painting from his house, among other valuable items, and Amina was able to sell it to an art curator named Andre, who happened to be a friend and a colleague of hers.
The money they got by selling the painting was probably enough to repay their debts, but the girls didn’t stop there. They kept on breaking into people’s houses, and they even robbed the Carlssons, who happened to be good friends with their parents. But things went haywire after Lollo and Mia met with an accident as the former was too drunk and she lost control of the car. Mia’s mother, Cecilia, was very angry at Lollo, and she went to her house to have a little chat with Margareta. Cecilia was of the opinion that they should inform the police about the accident as good samaritans, but Margareta wasn’t willing to do so as she knew that they might press charges against her daughter as she was the one who was driving. Klara and Lollo also fought on some petty issues, and that’s when Amina decided to pitch in, as she didn’t want the group to be divided, and let their crimes come to light.
The girls went to Lollo’s summer house in Vaxholm, and there too, they robbed the house of a wealthy man. The girls had stolen so many things that they felt the need to find a warehouse to keep them. Lollo remembered that her relative Carl Johan von Schmigel stayed nearby, and she went there to ask him for a place to keep the stolen items. Obviously, she lied to Carl and told him that one of her friends just wanted to keep the luggage because she was shifting to another place. The girls got an adrenaline rush while committing the act of breaking into a stranger’s house. It had become a habit for them, as over the course of time, they had become confident about the fact that they would never be caught. They were not seasoned criminals, and they were leaving trails unknowingly that could lead the police to them, but still, they went about their business unabashedly. They were from a privileged class, and none of them needed to take such risks because they already had everything they needed. It had become a game for them, and without having any shred of guilt about risking the reputation of their family, the Barracuda Queens kept on challenging the law enforcement authorities.
‘Barracuda Queens’ Ending Explained: How Did Mia, Amina, Klara, & Lollo Evade Arrest?
Klara was probably the most affected by the recent happenings as compared to everybody else. She was suspended from the law school and had broken up with her longtime boyfriend, Niklas. Unable to control her frustration, Klara told Niklas’ parents that she was responsible for the heists that were happening in the neighborhood. On the other hand, Amina was having a lot of problems dealing with her housekeeper, Trisha, who had started blackmailing her as she had overheard the conversation that Amina was having with Lollo and had gotten to know what the girls had been up to. Once, Amina had given Trisha earrings rather than money, who then committed the blunder of selling them at a pawn shop. The police tracked it down and came to Amina’s residence to question her. Although Trisha didn’t tell the police anything because Amina and Lollo had threatened her, the police were suspicious of the girls because they could be linked to every robbery that had taken place in the neighborhood. Lollo committed yet another blunder after having an argument with Carl, who was asking her to move all the items from his barn. Lollo, after having a heated argument with Carl, took the stolen Rolls-Royce and drove away. She was caught by the traffic police as to vent out her anger she was driving way beyond the speed limit. The suspicions of the police officers were strengthened even more, and though they still didn’t have any evidence, they knew that they were headed in the right direction.
We presumed that the girls were going to be caught eventually, but the ending of Barracuda Queens threw a curveball at us and changed the outcome completely. The police got a search warrant for Carl’s house as they had figured out that his barn was being used to store the stolen items, but when they went there, they didn’t find a single thing. The police officers were also surprised, but they made peace with the fact because they also felt that the girls being behind the burglary was a very far-fetched speculation as they couldn’t find any motive. They believed that because the girls came from such an affluent background, they didn’t have any probable cause to steal from other people. But that is where they got it all wrong since they were now stealing for fun. Margareta, Lollo’s mother, had an intuition that the girls were hiding something from her, and with time she realized that they were using Carl’s barn to store the stolen items. She went to meet Carl and told him that they would have to shift all the items to some other place since she knew that the police would come once again with a search warrant. Margareta and Carl shifted everything to the former’s office, and meanwhile, the police got hold of a person who had been convicted quite a few times before for burglaries. That person was stealing from Klara’s house, and coincidentally, her father saw him in the act and reported it to the police. Call it sheer luck; he had also taken a few items that the girls had stolen from various houses, and it became quite easy for the police to find a motive, connect all the dots, and pin the blame on this man.
The Barracuda Queens were released from police custody, and they felt invincible and proud after defeating an entire system and deceiving the police officers, who were so confident that they would find the real perpetrators. If a second season of Barracuda Queens happens, then we would see them committing more burglaries, as clearly, they hadn’t learned from their mistakes and weren’t feeling guilty about them at all. We don’t know what kind of individuals it makes them, but surely somebody had to make them realize that whatever they were doing was not right. The girls were slowly turning into kleptomaniacs, and we believe that it would just be a matter of time before they once again came under the radar of law enforcement authorities.
