Binge-r #226: Equinox + Britannia

Uneasy Listening: Danica Curcic (Astrid) in Equinox

EQUINOX S1

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All six episodes now streaming

Menacing tracking shots, otherworldly visions, mysterious figures, an inexplicable crime… Netflix’s new Danish mystery is a concentrated application of supernatural intrigue. If you’ve succumbed to previous incarnations of the genre, such as Netflix’s brain-bending German thriller Dark [season one review here] or the masterfully creepy French resurrection drama Les Revenants, then Equinox will resonate. But the series is not just a successor to those titles, it’s also a gateway introduction to a most particular genre – the scientific name of which is Weird Euro Terror – due to the concise nature of the season and the way it subtly opens up the narrowed confines of an obsessive descent. It can be a starting point as easily as a full stop.

One day in 1999 nine-year-old Astrid Agerskov (Viola Martinsen) watches her morose older sister, Ida (Karoline Hamm), depart on a traditional high school graduation bus trip, a boozy Danish tradition that ends badly when 21 students disappear, the remaining three can’t explain what happened, and the driver is in a coma. Cut to two decades later and the adult Astrid (Danica Curcic) is a radio host with a taste for the macabre and a dysfunctional life. Separated from her husband, it’s takes a single panicked phone call – “it’s all in the book!” – from one of the survivors, long blamed because of their incomprehension, to set her off. With her own issues lodged in the trauma of her beloved sibling going missing, Astrid starts to investigate the case for her radio show (this is one step away from starting a podcast).

Tea Lindeburg’s series is immersive rather than teasing. There are issues on the day and strange non-answers 20 years later, with a narrative that is punctuated by the visions Astrid experienced as the child and the very real sense that she is now cracking up the further she ventures into a hinterland of retired cops and secret identities. It’s all in, but that allows for it to weave in horror elements as well as adding storylines. From the second episode the show cuts between Astrid’s search, snatches of her childhood, and Ida’s own experiences in the weeks prior – the latter means that the missing sister is no cipher, but rather a figure whose own story stands in contrast to Astrid’s. That Ida is a more reliable narrator than Astrid is one of Equinox’s valuable tweaks, and the show has enough to make it more than a homage.

Gucci Mane: Kelly Reilly (Kerra) in Britannia

BRITANNIA S1 (Stan, all nine episodes now streaming): If Vikings is too straitlaced for you and you crave a fresh Game of Thrones fix, then this deliriously bonkers drama about the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD and the crazed collection of skeletal Druids and Celtic warrior queens the legions encounter will do the job – or at least periodically jolt your attention with ahistorical gambits or some surprisingly fierce fashions on the field (of battle). With psychedelics often ingested, there’s a mystical strain of English horror to this ancient campaign that has Kelly Reilly and Zoe Wanamaker as rival leaders, Mackenzie Crook on one as an incantatory Druid, and David Morrissey as the proud commander of the invading Roman forces. The creators are playwright/screenwriter Jez Butterworth and his brother Tom, who did not bother a great deal with academic texts when assembling this maddening mash-up. It’s not great, but Britannia is an easy overindulgence to take in.

>> Good Shows/New Seasons: There’s a raft of returning shows on Netflix, with second seasons now available for the solid post-apocalyptic railroad thriller Snowpiercer [season one review here]; the black (leather) comedy Bonding [season one review here]; and the celebrity cameo-laden French film business farce Call My Agent [season one review here].

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: David O. Russell’s American Hustle (2013, 138 minutes) is a vivid 1970s-set crime drama about con jobs and self-delusion with an exceptional Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Bradley Cooper; The Dead Pool (1988, 91 minutes) is a last gasp Dirty Harry action movie released just days before Die Hard that is mainly notable for Clint Eastwood’s young supporting cast: Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, and Jim Carrey.

New on SBS on Demand: Great films about great novelists are exceedingly rare, but Bjorn Runge’s The Wife (2017, 97 minutes) is a witheringly precise drama – starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce at their respective peaks – that undercuts the man of letters archetype by seditiously revealing his less heralded failings as the writer and his wife await the presentation of his Nobel Prize for Literature.

New on Stan: 12 Monkeys (1996, 130 minutes) is an apocalyptic time travel thriller – starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt – that allows director Terry Gilliam’s gift for discombobulation to achieve tragic resonance; David Fincher’s The Game (2000, 129 minutes) is one of the filmmaker’s more trying scenarios, but with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as disconcerting siblings its conspiracy riffs have an icy kick to them.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Stan’s empathetic 1980s LGBT drama It’s a Sin and Martin Scorsese’s delightful Netflix docuseries Pretend it’s a City.

>> Want BINGE-R sent to your inbox? Click here for the weekly e-mail.

>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 280 series reviewed here, 156 movies reviewed here, and 39 lists compiled here.