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.