Once again, a Lifetime movie is topping the charts on Netflix. This time, it’s a 2026 thriller called The Seemingly Perfect Family.

The Seemingly Perfect Family began streaming on Netflix on Tuesday, and quickly shot to the top of the streamer’s Top 10 Trending Movie Titles list. The film, which was directed by Lisa France, stars Rylee Reagan as an 18-year-old girl who ages out of the foster system and scams her way into a high-paying job as a live-in nanny for a wealthy couple. But she soon learns that working for these people is far more dangerous than being unemployed.

If that sounds familiar, yes, it’s basically the plot of The Housemaid, a much better movie, based on a 2022 novel, that you can watch streaming right now on Starz.

But unlike The Housemaid movie, The Seemingly Perfect Family claims that it was inspired by a true story. What’s that about?

The Seemingly Perfect Family movie true story:

The Seemingly Perfect Family movie claims, via text on screen at the beginning of the movie to be “inspired by true events.”

However, no one involved in the movie has said what, specifically, those true events are. And during the end credits of the movie, the usual legal disclaimer is displayed that “the characters and events of this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarities to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental and not intended.”

So why does the movie claim to be inspired by true events?

It’s possible that, while the characters and events are made up, the concept was partially inspired by the true story of Sophie Lionnet, a 21-year-old French au pair who was tortured and murdered in 2017 by the London couple, Ouissem Medouni and Sabrina Kouider, who employed her.

That said, if this is the story that inspired The Seemingly Perfect Family movie, the movie made a lot of changes from the true story. The real story of Sophie Lionnet is far more brutal, and far more tragic.

The Seemingly Perfect Family: Who was Sophie Lionnet?

According to a report done by the BBC, Sophie Lionnet was a young French girl, who moved from her home in Troyes, in north-east France, to the United Kingdom in January 2016, when she was just 20 years old, in order to improve her English. Soon after, she got a job as a live-in nanny, working for a French couple who lived in southwest London, named Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni.

Lionnet worked for Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni, caring for their two young boys, for 18 months. According to a report from The Independent, she was essentially a prisoner during those months, fielding threats, starvation, and physical abuse from her employers.

“Other local nannies observed that Ms Lionnet seemed to think it was normal that she was barely paid, and dropped hints over time that she was scared, while a fish and chip shop owner recalled her grabbing food as if starving,” Independent reporter Lizzie Dearden wrote.

Michael Cromer, the fish and chip shop owner, told the BBC at that Lionnet once told him she was beaten for small mistakes. “Once she said Sabrina beat her… I asked why, and she said she had dropped the butter.”

Neighbors finally called authorities in September of 2017, when they detected a strong, unpleasant smell emanating from Kouider and Medouni’s backyard bonfire. Medouni claimed he was “cooking sheep,” but firefighters discovered Lionnet’s burnt body.

In the court case that followed, authorities uncovered filmed recordings over the course of 12 days, leading up to Lionnet’s murder, in which Kouider and Medouni brutally tortured Lionnet, while interrogating her about a supposed relationship with Kouider’s ex-boyfriend, Mark Walton, the founder of a band called Boyzone.

In the trial, the court was told Kouider was obsessed with her ex, and harbored a delusion that Lionnet was in cahoots with Walton, in order to frame her for crimes that would lose her custody of her and Walton’s son. She made a series of bizarre, unsubstantiated claims, including that Lionnet obtained drugs from Walton, drugged Kouider’s children, and sexually abused them.

According to the BBC report, torture methods included Kouider and Medouni dunking Lionnet’s head in water, hitting her with an electric cable, and beating her badly enough to have five broken ribs and a fractured breast bone.

Under this extreme duress and abuse—facing threats of rape, prison, and more physical abuse—Kouider and Medouni obtained an illegitimate “confession” from Lionnet that she had a sexual relationship with Walton, and that she had drugged Medouni and sexually assaulted him. After obtaining this illegitimate “confession,” the couple murdered Lionnet in their bath tub, and burned her body in their backyard. The cause of death is not certain, because of the body’s burns.

Kouider and Medouni both tried to pin the blame for the other, each saying they were asleep at the time of the murder.

In the trial, Walton testified that he had never met Lionnet in his life. He also testified that told that Kouider would “flip” during their “turbulent” two-year relationship.

Kouider and Medouni were convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. Their lawyers appealed the length of the sentence, and that appeal was rejected in 2019.