New Nordic noir series The Chestnut Man (Kastanjemanden) is on Netflix from September 29. Based on the debut novel of The Killing creator, Søren Sveistrup, The Chestnut Man is a chilling psychological thriller in just 6 episodes that will have you hooked.

The Chestnut Man opens with the discovery of the brutal murders of an entire family in an isolated farm in 1987. More than thirty years later, in present day Copenhagen, a young woman is found brutally murdered in a playground with one of her hands missing. Detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) is assigned to the case. With her reluctant new partner, Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), they notice a tiny figurine made of chestnuts lying next to the body. A mysterious piece of evidence is soon discovered on the chestnut man—the fingerprint of a missing girl, the daughter of politician Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner).

All the ingredients of a great Nordic noir are there: violent and gruesome serial murders, a work-obsessive female detective, an initially-hostile detective partnership, and a dark grizzly, in this case autumnal, mood pervading throughout. Fans of The Killing will not be disappointed (although they might miss Sarah Lund’s iconic sweaters).

The Chestnut Man opens with horrifying images of a whole family slaughtered in their home, discovered by a soon-to-be-retired policeman sent to investigate stray farm animals. This opening sequence sets the tone, dark and unforgiving, and looms over the episodes, unmentioned until its significance is revealed much later in the series. The sequence ends with one clue as to how it relates to the future serial murders, when the policeman finds a room filled with chestnut men.

In present day Copenhagen, these chestnut men are the calling card of a mysterious serial murderer left next to the mutilated bodies of seemingly unconnected women. The chestnut men further link the murders to another year-old case of a missing girl, Kristine Hartung, the daughter of politician Rosa Hartung, which is considered by the police as solved. A man named Linus Bekker confessed to her murder.

The Chestnut Man is an intense, and at times quite scary, thriller with an incredibly well-paced structure, leaving a trail of crumbs for its detective duo and the viewers to pick up and connect the dots to an unexpected and satisfying ending.

Thulin and Hess form an engaging if familiar duo. Naia Thulin is a great homicide detective, but wants to transfer to the cybernetic department, so that she may spend more time with her daughter Le. A single mother, Thulin relies heavily on her adopted father to look after her daughter. The reason for this becomes clear as the series unfold. Thulin becomes so absorbed in solving the case she is investigating that she easily leaves in the middle of dinner or Le’s school play.

Mark Hess is a Europol agent, with a mysterious past, who has been assigned to this case. Although Hess appears to Thulin as uninterested in the case, creating initial friction between the two, he soon becomes just as obsessed with solving it as Thulin, pushing for further investigation on certain links that Thulin did not dare make. The relationship between Thulin and Hess builds up steadily, going from initial mistrust to mutual understanding once they get to know each other a little better.

The Chestnut Man is a great Nordic Noir, an absorbing murder mystery with themes of grief, revenge, parenthood and child abuse. I think its only flaw is that it is only 6 episodes long. A SAM Productions series, The Chestnut Man was directed by Mikkel Serup and Kasper Barfoed, and co-written for the screen by Søren Sveistrup, Dorte W. Høgh and David Sandreuter.

Source: Forbes

American paper Vermont’s Independent Voices Seven Days has reviewed Equinox. Check it out what they said about it:

It’s no surprise to learn that “Equinox” started as an audio drama. Astrid initially announces her intention to tape a radio show about the mystery, a perfect setup for the mockumentary format so popular with horror podcasts.

But the Netflix version abandons the radio-show conceit almost immediately. Rather than follow Astrid’s progress toward the truth in procedural fashion, “Equinox” hops around in time. Flashbacks make us privy to Ida’s perspective in the months before her disappearance, showing us things that Astrid has no way of knowing.

Or should have no way of knowing — because Astrid, it turns out, has always had an awareness of things beyond her ken. She’s not much of a detective or a journalist; viewers expecting a whodunit will be frustrated by the seeming lack of logic with which she investigates. (For instance, after failing to connect with Jakob, she appears to forget about the other two surviving students for a while.) In fact, Astrid is a bit of a basket case — or she’s the only person who’s ever known the truth about what happened, and would still know it if she hadn’t allowed her elders to convince her she was mentally ill.

With its unreliable, often passive protagonist, “Equinox” is closer to moody horror than to mystery. It seems to be aiming for that “Twin Peaks” vibe; any solution is secondary to the realization that everything in ordinary life is woven through with sinister intention.

If the characters’ motivations don’t always hold up, the acting does. Viola Martinsen is haunting and haunted as the psychic 9-year-old Astrid, and several performers do memorably quirky turns in small roles.

The filmmakers excel at creating creepy visual textures. Aerial shots of the woods are a horror cliché these days, but here the drone photographers also get major mileage out of the city of Copenhagen, with its cold, glassy skyscrapers and stone row houses as severe as Victorian matrons. Folkloric motifs — birds, hares — weave their way into the narrative. When Ida and her school friends get involved in the occult, the action moves to a deserted island that becomes the scene of a hypnotically eccentric equinox ritual.

“Equinox” feels like a dream, with less of a climax than a foregone conclusion. And when it’s over, viewers may find most of the story vanishing from memory, as dreams do. But you’ll probably never think of graduation and its associated rites of passage the same way again.

British newspaper The Guardian has published a review on Danica’s latest work, Equinox. Check it out:

The blackest days of winter might feel like the ideal time for another bracing shot of cool Scandi-noir, but Netflix’s Danish series Equinox has no chill. No quirky detectives in enviable knitwear here, striding through attractive low-rise cities and crisp forests to apply logic to crimes of sadness. We’re somewhere wilder and murkier.

Astrid (Danica Curcic) is a 30-ish, recently separated mother of one who has been styled according to the TV drama template for a damaged soul. Her mousy hair straggles forlornly, her unwillingness to deviate from plain vests and cardigans is a blatant cry for help, and she has got exactly the job you would expect a character defined by fraught intensity to have: she’s a journalist, hosting a late-night radio phone-in that trades in feverish thoughts and liminal fears.

One evening, a disturbing call comes in, prompting a trip back home to Copenhagen to re-investigate the tragedy that destroyed her family when she was a girl. Flashbacks place us in the summer of 1999, when Astrid’s older sister Ida disappeared into thin air, along with a busload of students who had just finished secondary school. Here’s the thing: little Astrid wasn’t surprised when the cops came knocking with bad news, because she had foreseen the calamity in her dreams. Now her visions have started up again, and that shocking phone call is from one of three students who were on the fateful bus ride, but who unaccountably didn’t vanish and have been scarred by the experience. They’re still out there, harbouring secrets Astrid’s imagination might be able to unlock.

So begins one of those rabbit-hole yarns where someone who we don’t believe is delusional increasingly seems that way to their anxious loved ones, because most of their evidence is in their head, and the only people who can corroborate their theories have also had their lives blighted by The Event. It’s the sort of show where the hero takes delivery of a Jiffy bag containing an old cassette player and an anonymous note requesting a meeting, and then the meeting turns out to be at a disused fairground. There’s a dash of Ring, a waft of Stranger Things, a memory of The Returned and a flavour of The Da Vinci Code, all brewed into an overall spookiness that covers the many plot holes – most of them of the “main character fails to ask obvious follow-up question” kind – with a smothering fog.

That’s fine if it’s just to fix the narrative, but Equinox takes a risk by mixing fantastical gubbins with some dead-serious issues. The young and old Astrid are properly disturbed by their nightmares, and the early episodes in particular are a duck call for viewers who see themselves in a woman dogged by overthinking, anxiety and perhaps even psychosis. Astrid’s mental health is integral to the plot: it’s a riddle wrapped in a diagnosis. Sometimes, it feels as if we’re toying with trauma like a teenager messing with a Ouija board.

Equinox also proves to be a show about how differing reactions to loss can pull apart those left behind; about how parents can’t ever be certain that the decisions they make for their children are right, but know the wrong ones can stay with their kids for ever; and about how sad or vulnerable people are susceptible to conspiracy theory and belief in myths. Such recognisable, mundane concerns are, in the best tales about someone who may or may not be experiencing the supernatural, delicately played off against the flickering possibility that magic might actually happen.

That’s a balance Equinox doesn’t quite strike. It shows its hand too early and, as the lurid twists pile up and the probability of a satisfying ending falls, the chances of anything useful being said about the characters’ pain – which many viewers might share and recognise – also recedes. We can see the real emotions the show is trying to talk about, but it’s too far gone from reality to feel a proper connection.

But Equinox isn’t a full-on exploitation ghost train either. Curcic has the right sort of fragile, haunted bravery for the driven Astrid, and Karoline Hamm is excellent as the doomed Ida, a carefree teen who’s the hottest, coolest girl in a friend group riven by interlocking unrequited yearnings, but whose sexual awakening is something she’s not ready to control. For stretches of its not-overlong, easily binged six episodes, Equinox casts some sort of spell. Just don’t think about it too much.

Netflix has released trailer for Equinox with English subtitles. Check it out!

Decider has published a review on Danica’s latest work:

Opening Shot: We go up the toy-laden stairs of a house to the room of a 9 year-old girl playing with her dolls. She hears a truck coming and dashes downstairs.

The Gist: It’s high school graduation day for Ida (Karoline Hamm), the older sister of 9 year-old Astrid (Viola Martinsen). She’s on the back of a truck with friends, off to a party, but have made a stop at Ida’s parents’ house. Ida is a bit distraught, upset at something during what is supposed to be the best day of her young life. Her mother, Lene (Hanne Hedelund), tries to stop her from going to the party, but her father Dennis (Hanne Hedelund) says that Lene is being uptight.

That night, Astrid has a vision of the truck Ida and her friends are in braking hard, sending all the teens flying. Indeed, that night, the authorities come and say that the whole graduating class, except for 3 people, have disappeared without a trace.

Astrid, now a 30-year-old (Danica Curcic), wakes up from that recurring dream, haunted by her sister’s disappearance. She’s a radio host in her small town, doing a nighttime show where she takes oddball calls about oddball subjects, like superstition. She shares custody of her daughter Vera (Andrea Engelsmann Persson) with her estranged husband David (Zaki Nobel), who still doesn’t quite understand why she moved out.

One night at work, she gets a call on the air from Jakob Skipper, Ida’s boyfriend at the time of the disappearance. He claims he knows what happened the night of the disappearance; he’s one of the three graduates that didn’t disappear that night.

After that call, she decides to go to Copenhagen to investigate, and to do a show about Ida’s disappearance. She stays with her dad and his new wife, and he’s angry that she’s stirring things up in Ida’s disappearance once again. She looks for Jakob, but his older brother Mathias (Rasmus Hammerich) says he hasn’t been around for a long time.

Flashing back to 1999, young Astrid continues to have visions, usually of creepy male figures walking around; she gets to the point where she sleepwalks into the street. Those visions continue in Copenhagen, especially after she hears the videotaped interrogation of the three survivors, Jakob (August Carter), Amelia (Fanny Bornedal) and Falke (Ask Truelsen). She even envisions someone jumping off the roof of the building across the street from where she’s staying.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Equinox is a cross between Lost and any number of shows where someone tries to find out what happened to a loved one a couple of decades after they vanished or were murdered. It definitely fits in the “Scandi-noir” genre that most of Netflix’s original programming from Denmark and other Scandinavian countries falls into.

Our Take: Equinox is based on Tia Lindeburg’s podcast Equinox 1985; Lindeburg created the series, with Piv Bernth serving as the showrunner. The first episode is a surprisingly effective setup of Astrid’s story, going back and forth between 1999 and 2020 to give context to the pain Astrid has felt for 21 years over what is obviously a situation that hasn’t given her any closure.

We don’t yet have a lot of context about why Astrid has waited over two decades to try to look into Ida’s disappearance; we do know that it and the visions she has of it have troubled her enough for her to break up her marriage, and that the call from Jakob spurred her to action. But those missing pieces didn’t matter all that much in the first episode; there was more than enough tension and character development to let us know how much of an effect Ida’s disappearance has had on Astrid’s life.

It’s little details that come through in Curcic’s performance that are telling in this regard. She rubs her jaw over and over because she clenches it so tightly; even a mouth guard can’t keep her from feeling the pain of her TMJ problems. The change in her expression as she turns a light talk with David about him going out to a serious talk about the town seeing him with another woman is chilling. We just know how intense and serious Astrid is, without having to have everything explained to us.

But what the first episode accomplishes is that it shows us more than enough information to get us curious. For instance, we hear about an island during Falke’s interrogation, which the three survivors and Ida all went to. So that tells us that there’s something going on that’s beyond just a simple disappearance. Astrid’s visions are beyond just dreams about Ida; she sees things and beings that she can’t explain, and those visions have been going on for decades. Ida’s disappearance has led Astrid to a career talking about superstitions and the supernatural, so this feeds into those visions and vice versa. We also know that her father wants nothing to do with Astrid’s investigation and her mother is either dead or in a psychiatric ward somewhere, not able to forgive herself for not being able to stop Ida from getting on that truck.

In other words, the first episode of Equinox gives the viewer a chance to follow along with the story without having to make assumptions and connections in their own heads while watching. And in a psychological thriller like this, that’s a helpful start.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Astrid wakes up to a call from Mathias saying that Jakob threw himself off a building earlier that day, just like her vision. She then goes to the bathroom and sees a man lurking in the mirror; he disappears when she turns on the light.

Sleeper Star: Lars Brygmann plays Astrid’s father Dennis, who is so adamant that his daughter doesn’t open up this can of worms all over again, you have to wonder if he had something to do with Ida’s disappearance.

Most Pilot-y Line: Astrid tries to throw herself at David when she realizes he’s starting to move on. “You were the one who wanted this,” he tells her. “I don’t know what I want,” she replies. It’s not a horrible line, but it’s also an easy tell to indicate how lost Astrid is.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Equinox has the potential to be a taught psychological thriller with supernatural overtones. Of the shows we’ve seen in the Scandi-noir genre, it’s one of the better ones.

he filming of The Chestnut Man has just begun in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Danish psychological thriller has its roots in the Nordic noir genre and is based on the acclaimed novel ‘The Chestnut Man’ by Søren Sveistrup (The Killing) and stars award-winning actress Danica Curcic (The Mist, Equinox), Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (The Rain, A Royal Affair), David Dencik (Chernobyl, James Bond ‘No Time To Die’), Iben Dorner (Borgen) and Lars Ranthe (Ride Upon The Storm).

The Chestnut Man is a character-driven psychological thriller. It takes the viewer on a dark and unpredictable hunt for a killer who leaves chestnut figurines as a creepy calling card on the victims, and suddenly is one case linked to a high-profile missing-child investigation. The story is told over six episodes and will be produced by SAM Productions (Ragnarok) and directed by Mikkel Serup (The Killing).

The Chestnut Man is set in a quiet suburb of Copenhagen, where the police make a terrible discovery one blustery October morning. A young woman is found brutally murdered in a playground and one of her hands is missing. Above her hangs a small man made of chestnuts. The ambitious young detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) is assigned to the case, along with her new partner, Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard). They soon discover a mysterious piece of evidence on the chestnut man – evidence connecting it to a girl who went missing a year earlier and was presumed dead – the daughter of politician (DK: Socialminister) Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner).

The cast includes Danica Curcic, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, David Dencik, Iben Dorner, Lars Ranthe, Esben Dalgaard, Morten Brovn, Thomas Hwan, Signe Egholm, Jens Jørgen Spottag, Camilla Lau, Peder Thomas Pedersen, Marie-Lydie Melono Nokouda and Anders Hove among others.

The Chestnut Man is based on Søren Sveistrup’s acclaimed debut novel by the same name and has been translated into 28 languages and published in 50 countries. The series is created for the screen by Søren Sveistrup, Dorte Høgh, David Sandreuter & Mikkel Serup.

The series is directed by Mikkel Serup (The Killing, Pros and Cons) and will be produced by SAM Productions who is also behind the successful Norwegian Netflix original Ragnarok and the new season of the newly announced Borgen. Producers are Stine Meldgaard and Morten Kjems Hytten Juhl, executive producers are Søren Sveistrup and Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen. The series is set to launch on Netflix worldwide. Launch date is still to be announced.