Sigge Eklund’s first film as a director, written by Michaela Hamilton out of her own loss, follows a 17-year-old who takes over her dead sister’s clothes, friends and boyfriend. Zara Larsson, in her first screen role, plays the sister.

A Part of You (En del av dig) is a Swedish coming-of-age drama that Netflix released worldwide on 31 May 2024. Its premise fits in one line: a 17-year-old girl who has always lived in her older sister’s shadow loses that sister and, instead of stepping out of the shadow, steps into it. The film is the feature directing debut of Sigge Eklund, one of Sweden’s best-known novelists and podcast hosts, it works from an original screenplay by Michaela Hamilton, and it gives Zara Larsson, the Swedish pop singer behind Lush Life and Symphony, her first role as an actor.

The story: Agnes, Julia and Noel

Agnes, played by Felicia Truedsson (credited in Netflix’s own materials as Felicia Maxime), is 17 and lives with her family in Sweden. Her older sister Julia, played by Zara Larsson, is everything Agnes is not and would like to be. In the words of the official synopsis, Julia is the coolest person at school, the centre of every party, and she is dating Noel, played by Edvin Ryding. Agnes admires her without reservation, and the story starts from that admiration rather than from any open rivalry between the two sisters.

Then the worst happens. Julia dies in a car accident after leaving a party, following an argument with Noel. The synopsis describes Agnes’s world being turned upside down and her being forced to reinvent herself, and the reinvention takes an unsettling shape: she starts wearing Julia’s clothes, moves into Julia’s circle of friends and begins a relationship with Noel. Suddenly, as the synopsis puts it, she is on the verge of obtaining everything she ever desired. The question the film poses is the price, and the people closest to Julia, the girls’ own parents among them, are the first to push back.

That is as far as this piece goes on plot. The interest of A Part of You lies in how its central question unfolds, and the film is better met without knowing where Agnes ends up. What can be said is that the setup belongs to a recognisable family of stories, those about someone who borrows the life of a person they loved or envied, and that it places that story in a high school, among teenagers, where clothes, parties and couples are already the currency of status.

A screenplay born from a real loss

The script is by Michaela Hamilton, a Swedish screenwriter born in 1991 whose earlier credits, according to SF Studios, include the series Eagles and A Class Apart. When Netflix and SF Studios announced the project on 31 March 2023, Hamilton explained where it came from: “This story is deeply personal to me, as I lost my 19-year-old brother in an accident seven years ago. I felt compelled to write about both sides of loss – the immense pain of it, but also the love and hope that can emerge in the process.”

That statement changes how the premise reads. On paper, a girl who slips into her dead sister’s life could be the setup for a dark teen thriller; Hamilton’s starting point is a bereavement she went through herself. Giving that loss to a younger sibling who imitates the one who died, rather than mourning her from a distance, is the screenplay’s central idea. The official logline, repeated across the Netflix and SF Studios materials, calls the film “a story about life and death that portrays the experience of being 17 years old and feeling like your heart is about to burst from your chest.”

Sigge Eklund, from novels and podcasts to directing

Sigge Eklund, born in Stockholm in 1974 and raised in the suburb of Akalla, came to directing late and by an unusual route. He made his debut as a novelist in 1999 with Synantrop, published by Albert Bonniers, followed by Den sista myten (2002) and two books presented as autobiographical, Det är 1988 och har precis börjat snöa (2005) and Varulvsvalsen (2007). His fifth novel, the thriller In i labyrinten (2014), was the first that was not autobiographical, and its rights were sold to publishers in several countries, among them Germany, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. In 2024, the year A Part of You premiered, he also published the novel Gruppen.

In Sweden he is at least as well known for his voice as for his books. With Alex Schulman he hosts Alex & Sigges podcast, which won the awards for best original channel and best Swedish channel at the Svenska podradiopriset in 2012, and the pair have co-written two books, Tid (2015) and Rum (2017). Between 2010 and 2012 he worked in Los Angeles as a television format developer, where he ran a blog called Movies They Should Make, and he has written four film scripts that were never produced. A Part of You, from a screenplay by someone else, is the first feature he has directed.

His reason for choosing Hamilton’s script, given in the same announcement, was that he had “been waiting my whole life for a screenplay that captures the horror and the magic of being a teenager.” He added: “When I read Michaela Hamilton’s story I was blown away by the fact that it was all in there. The desperation and the beauty and that sense of urgency that you can only feel when you are 17.” Horror and magic is the double register the project announced for itself from the start: a death at its centre, and around it the intensity of the age when everything feels decisive.

The cast: a Young Royals reunion and a pop star’s debut

Felicia Truedsson, born in 2000, has been acting since the age of 11, when she made her debut in the period drama Anno 1790. She is known in Sweden for playing Stephanie in the series Lyckoviken and, internationally, for the role of Stella in the Netflix series Young Royals. She also writes: among her scripts is a short film that was selected for the Göteborg Film Festival in 2022. A Part of You gives her the lead, in the role around which the whole story is built.

Edvin Ryding, born in 2003, started acting at the age of five in the series Mannen under trappan and became internationally known as Prince Wilhelm in Young Royals (2021–2024). In 2022 he was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list. According to SF Studios, he and Felicia Truedsson had worked together twice before A Part of You, on Young Royals and on the disaster film The Abyss. After this film, Ryding made his Hollywood debut in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025).

The most famous name in the cast belongs to someone who had never acted in a film. Zara Larsson, born in 1997, won the Swedish talent show Talang in 2008 at the age of ten and went on to an international pop career built on songs such as Lush Life, Never Forget You, recorded with MNEK, and Symphony, the Clean Bandit single that gave her a first number one in the United Kingdom. In 2024, the year of this film, she released the album Venus on her own label, Sommer House. A Part of You is her acting debut, and her character is the sister whose death sets the story in motion.

Around the three leads, Ida Engvoll, known for the Netflix series Love & Anarchy and for the film A Man Called Ove (2015), plays Carina, and Mustafa Al-Mashhadani, from the police series Thin Blue Line, plays Amir. Alva Bratt, from Barracuda Queens, Emil Hedayat, Olivia Essén, Nikki Hanselblad and Maxwell Cunningham complete the ensemble.

Behind the camera

The film is produced by Stefan H. Lindén and Alexandra Thönnersten for SF Studios, the Stockholm company founded in 1919 and today part of the Bonnier group, with Tim King as executive producer. The leads were announced on 13 May 2023 and principal photography began in Stockholm at the end of that month. The cinematographer is Josephine Owe, the editor Sarah Patient Nicastro and the production designer Cecilia Bornebusch, and the original music is by Wilhelm Börjesson and Oskar Rindborg. The finished film runs about 100 minutes.

A Part of You belongs to a line of Swedish productions for Netflix aimed at a young audience, a line in which Young Royals, which ran for three seasons between 2021 and 2024, is the obvious reference point and with which it shares two of its leads. It also belongs to the long tradition of the coming-of-age film, a genre in which a loss is often the event that closes childhood. What sets its premise apart is the choice to make imitation, rather than rebellion or withdrawal, the protagonist’s answer to a death.

A question rather than a verdict

What A Part of You brings together is an unusual mix of backgrounds: a novelist and podcaster directing his first feature, a screenwriter writing from her own bereavement, two actors who grew up on screen together and a pop star in her first role. The story they share asks a simple and uncomfortable question, what happens when the person left behind tries to become the one who is gone. How far the film takes that question, and whether it answers it, is something each viewer will judge for themselves.