In the latter half of the Book of Genesis, the patriarch Jacob’s sons gang up on Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, and sell him into slavery. After the terrible deed is done, they come back to their father bearing Joseph’s coat of many colors, which they have torn and smeared with sheep’s blood to make it look as if Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. Jacob is inconsolable and sinks into a state of deep mourning for 22 years until his eventual dramatic reunion with Joseph in Egypt. Why, though, ask the rabbinic sages, did Jacob continue to mourn for Joseph after the first year? Is there not a tradition that says that the spirit of the departed begins to leave the memory of the mourner after the first year? This tradition, answer the sages, only applies when the departed person is dead. Jacob continued to mourn for Joseph not because he believed that his son had died but because he never gave up hope that he was still alive.
A similar spirit animates the soul of Astrid Agerskov, the protagonist of the new Danish mystery series Equinox, now streaming on Netflix. Based on a Danish podcast, the series centers on the aforementioned Astrid, a journalist who hosts a call-in radio show called The Voice of the Night, in which she discusses superstitions, apparitions, and other occult phenomena, appropriate work for someone troubled by disturbing specters of her own. When she was a young girl, her older sister Ida went off in a party truck with 23 other students. The truck never returned. What exactly happened to it is shrouded in mystery, but whatever it was, it led to the disappearance of nearly everyone in the truck, including Ida. The cryptic events of that day continue to haunt Astrid into her adulthood, afflicting her with nightmares and waking visions of horror but also, strangely, nourishing her with an undying sense of hope.
During her nightly radio show, she takes static-filled calls from people spouting superstitions such as, “There is another reality, a reality behind the one we’re in.” One day, she gets a call from a Jakob Skipper, who claims to have known Ida and why she disappeared. He tries to warn Astrid that “it’s going to happen again.” She shudders. “What you call superstitions are real,” he continues. “It’s all in the book.” He tells her they have to meet. Now, she’s positively shaking. He hangs up before she can question him further. But the amateurish call-screener neglected to take down his name or number, foreclosing, or at least seeming to foreclose, any chance of her tracking him down.
Half in tears and half in rage, Astrid marches back home and unearths a stash of yellowed newspapers about the accident, which she’s kept buried in a chest underneath her bureau, and sees that “Jakob Skipper” was indeed one of the three students to have been found after the accident. She decides to do a radio program on the accident, hoping that Jakob will call again and give her some closure about what happened to her sister. “You said you would never talk about your sister,” her puzzled ex-husband says to her one day, “and now, you want to make a show about her?” But it’s the only way, she believes, to find out if her sister is still alive.
She goes to Copenhagen, trying to track down people who might know Jakob or others who were present on the day of the accident. The dread in Equinox is not only in the past, however; frightful things continue to happen in the here and now, sticking Astrid with the double challenge of attempting to live in the present while confronting the traumas of her past. As we hear someone say during one of her flashbacks, “Some say that life is understood backwards but lived forwards. It’s something Kierkegaard said.” Some also say that you’re allowed twice as many Soren Kierkegaard references as usual if you happen to be in Denmark.
Equinox plays out along this Kierkegaardian plane: The past illuminates the present, and the present sheds light on the past. The audience is continually presented with flashbacks, interwoven with folk tales, occultology, neopaganism, and college dorm room-level existentialist pontificating, and a steady stream of surrealistic visions. These fantasy sequences are particularly well done: Equinox bathes our screens with flashes of silver, plumes of smoke, and discomfiting midnight-blue neon before shifting to raspberry red and cotton-candy pink. From their imaginative visual tastes, it’s clear that writer Tea Lindeburg and directors Soren Balle and Mads Matthiesen have learned a good deal from classic dark fantasy films such as Return to Oz (1985) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in addition to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and even Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Are You Afraid of the Dark? however, this is not — the supernatural elements of Equinox are not as prominent as advertised. Neither is it merely a Danish mashup of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Wicker Man, and Cold Case. What it is is an original and intriguing series in its own right. Early on in episode one, a woman leans in toward Astrid and says she has a secret to tell her: “Life is one big disappointment.” The bad news, as anyone over the age of 30 can easily attest, is that she’s right. The good news is that Equinox is not among these disappointments.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
