DimitrisPassas-TapTheLine

During the last fifteen years, a vast array of Nordic crime fiction television shows have been aired and some of them acquired legendary status while others failed to meet the audiences' high demands. Equinox is a 2020 Danish production that belongs to the latter group, despite the carefully selected cast and interesting cinematography as it lacks a coherent plot, the story is bland, and the supernatural element is not harmonically integrated into the narrative. The producers attempted to create a series that would combine many different genres such as horror, crime, mystery, and whodunit, but the final result is less than satisfying as Equinox is a show that resists strict genre categorization for all the wrong reasons. The horror dimension, which supposedly would make this production stand out from other Scandinavian crime shows, is handled amateurishly and fails to convince the viewer who wants more than a few dream sequences where everything is foggy and an ancient monster-like figure lurks in the shadows. The mystery part and whodunit are almost non-existent as everything is explained in the first two or three episodes while the villain is clearly pointed out in the middle of the show. What is left, is a lukewarm storyline with many sub-plots that are so cliched and simplistic that become almost laughable.

The protagonist is Astrid (Danica Curcic) whose sister, Ida (Karoline Hamm), disappeared without a trace twenty years ago and nobody has ever heard of her since. Ida vanished on her graduation day as she, along with her best friends, Jakob, Amelia, and Falke, was riding a truck heading to a place where they could celebrate their last day at school. Today, Astrid is severely traumatized by this event and when she receives a phone call from Jakob in her radio show claiming that he knows what happened to Ida, she decides to return to Copenhagen, where her family is still living, to investigate the case that haunts her since her childhood. She will have to overcome her father's reluctance to help her in her endeavor and she will be shocked when she learns that Jakob has committed suicide soon after he made that phone call to her. Astrid will approach every single person connected to her sister and also her mother who has separated from her dad and now lives on her own in the old family's house.

The story is narrated through flashbacks in the past where the audience witnesses what happened soon before and soon after Ida's disappearance, while in the present timeline we follow Astrid's lonely quest to uncover the truth about her sister's fate. She is insistent and determined to get to the bottom of it because her bond with Ida was very strong as we see in some of the flashback scenes. Danica Curcic (The Absent One, Nobel, The Mist) delivers a decent performance as Astrid and the pain that the character feels is evident in the Serbian actress's facial expressions and body language. Veteran Danish thespian Lars Brygmann (Dicte, Borgen, A Funny Man) is splendid, as always, in the role of Astrid's father who tries to protect his daughter from truths that would devastate her. Karoline Hamm (Darkness: Those Who Kill) and Fanny Leander Bornedal (Journal 64, Bron/Broen) prove that there is a bright future for Danish cinema and television as they are both great in their respective roles.

The main problem with Equinox is its weak screenplay and implausible story which is narrated in a dull way and without the proper pacing. The climax in the final episode is thoroughly disappointing as there is nothing left to be explained while the revelation of the culprit is so predictable that leaves a bitter taste to the audience. From my experience, the best TV shows are those which are based on novels and this has been proved on numerous occasions in the past. Unfortunately, this is not the case here and it shows. This is not a series that you will remember for a long time after watching and it seems that lately, Netflix opts for mediocre productions that taint the Nordic noir genre as a whole. Let's hope that this will be the last of inferior Scandinavian productions and that we will soon watch shows analogous to those that made this genre our beloved one.

Yorgos Lanthimos is definitely the most popular contemporary Greek auteur and his films have all been well-received by the global audiences and critics as well. He began as a video clip and TV commercials director while he created his first feature film, Kinetta, in 2005. Nevertheless, Lanthimos's first major success that put him in the spotlight was Dogtooth, a daring allegory focusing on family relationship dynamics and their effects on the individual. Domestic oppression, free will or the lack of it, and distortion of reality through the misuse of language were the central themes in this compelling movie which has been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year in the 2011 Oscar Awards. Furthermore, Dogtooth signified the beginning of a thriving collaboration between Lanthimos and screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, a partnership that delivered some of the most intriguing movies of the following decade. The Lobster is a 2015 production in which Lanthimos and Filippou exceed themselves and present a monumental parable about the nature of love set in a dystopian alternative universe where a tyranny of companionship dominates the people and forces them to mate with a fellow human. The inventive storyline is combined with a well-paced plot that moves forward handily and stunning photography that grips the audience from the beginning until the end. The cast is excellent with Colin Farell, who would also participate in Lanthimos's later film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in the role of David, a timid man who struggles to survive in an absurd world where the fate of each person is decided by an omnipotent system which possesses supernatural powers. Farell's portrayal of David is measured and consistent, building a character who lacks any heroic dimension, while at the same time retaining the characteristics that define him as a human such as fear, compassion, or even cruelty.

Being a single, middle-aged man, David is arrested and sent to an institution where he has to stay for a defined period of time in order to mate with a woman. The punishment for not succeeding at this simple task is his transformation into an animal of his own liking. David's choice is a lobster because they live for over 100 years, he has blue blood, like aristocrats, and is fertile for as long as he lives. He is accompanied by a dog, his brother who couldn't manage to find a partner so he suffered the consequences. The institution's director has set strict rules for all the guests/prisoners who can extend their abidance by hunting the loners, a group of people living in the nearby woods who don't conform to the existing status quo and choose to live by their own rules. David will soon get acquainted with several people who share his predicament and he will attempt to approach a woman who seemingly has no feelings about anyone or anything. The result of this relationship will be dreadful and the protagonist will have no other solution but to escape the institution and live as a loner.

In Lanthimos's fictional universe, humans are defined by their deficiencies. There is the woman with the nosebleeds, the man with a limp foot, the heartless woman, the blind woman, and so on. These imperfections are central to the construction of the peoples' identity and determine their choice of a possible partner. Shared life means shared pain. Thus, several people try to imitate the defects of the others during their stay in the institution, even if it is a lie. It is the only way to attract the attention of their prospective mates and they also know that the alternative is their conversion into an animal with all that it entails. It is a desperate situation, one that forces people to behave in ways that they couldn't imagine. When David joins the loners he quickly comprehends that the suffocating rules that made him escape from the institution are also present there. He is not allowed to have sex with another person, only to masturbate alone, and every form of companionship is prohibited in this new environment. His romantic entanglement with the short-sighted woman, played by Rachel Weisz, is now interpreted as a rebellious act of defiance against the new rules rather than a submission to the dominant norm.

The cinematography is sublime and fits the story perfectly. In the first part, we are witnessing the everyday life in the institution, a place that looks like a luxury hotel while in the second one, we are transferred to the much more primitive landscape where the loners live. This contrast of scenery adds up to an overall polarized feeling that is exuded from the story due to its bizarre foundation. In a way, the second part of The Lobster constitutes an inversion of the first one, an opposite image that enhances and magnifies the importance of the love story that lies in the center of the film. The use of music furnishes the story even further and I was particularly moved by the presence of two greek songs, "Apo mesa pethamenos" performed by Danae Stratigopoulou and, of course, "Ti einai afto pou to lene agapi" by Tonis Maroudas and Sophia Loren. As a Greek, I am proud that a director of this caliber is a compatriot of mine and I feel the same about the screenwriter, Efthimis Filippou, who wrote a story of unprecedented beauty and craftsmanship. Lanthimos has established his name as the greatest living Greek auteur and his movies are always something different, transcendent visual experiences that are bound to make the audiences think and feel intensely

WARNING: The article below contains spoilers.

In 2016, Sotiris Tsafoulias directed the Greek serial-killer motion picture The Other Me, featuring a plot that involved a perpetrator who murdered his victims in a brutal manner and left behind in the crime scenes quotes of the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras. The screenplay was co-authored by the well-known Cypriot crime fiction author, Tefkros Michaelides, who also wrote a novella, Periptosis Aftodikias, which inspired the creators of the film as far as the main storyline is concerned. The Other Me was a huge commercial success here in Greece and critics hailed the movie as one of the most compelling native productions of the genre. Three years later, the same team aired an informal sequel to the film in the form of television series which was distributed by the Greek broadcasting service, Cosmote TV, under the title The Other Me: Lost Souls (full review here). The show adopted the same plot trope of a serial-killer murder who wreaks havoc in Athens and whose murders are imitations of the six labors of Theseus, a legendary figure of Greek mythology. The protagonist in both the movie and the show is the criminology professor, Dimitris Lainis, a reserved and quiet character who is cooperating with the authorities in order to solve a series of disturbing atrocities and arrest villains who seem to enjoy puzzles and playing cat-and-mouse games with the police.

The story begins when a young woman, student at the University in which Lainis is lecturing, is found murdered in a hotel room, strangled and stabbed 21 times in her torso. Ilias Velissaratos (Constantine Markoulakis) is arrested for the murder as he wakes up in the hotel room where the killing took place while his fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. Lainis is convinced that his friend and colleague is innocent and immediately contacts the retired chief of the Homicide Unit, Apostolis Barasopoulos (Manos Vakousis) to ask for his help. Velissaratos insists that he is being framed due to his recent appointment as a nominee for the upcoming elections for the University's new dean. Lainis suspects that something is amiss regarding the University's financial situation and he is soon drawn into a nightmarish scenario when a second student is found murdered in a grisly way.

At the same time, a new chief is appointed to Athens Homicide Unit, Nikos Vanortas (Tasos Nousias), a seasoned investigator who is transferred from the Narcotics Division. Vanortas has a hard time trusting his inner thoughts to the rest of the team and seems to be rigid and impatient when it comes to others obeying his orders. His Lieutenant, Pantelis Sklavis (Petros Lagoutis) distrusts him and the cooperation between them comes to a halt when Vanortas asks him to something unthinkable. The Unit, as a whole, are surveilling a group of thugs who run a prostitution ring in the city which is led by a mysterious kingpin known as "The Reptile", a man no one has ever seen and his identity remains a well-hidden secret among the city's heavyweight criminals.

There are two main plot threads that merge into one as the plot evolves and the show reaches its shattering climax in the sublime final episode. The first one revolves around the University's elections and the second one focuses on the inner workings of The Reptile's gang. The audience witnesses a fair amount of double-crossing and backstabbing as the story ends up being a battle of wits between the authorities and the enigmatic Reptile. There is a lot of suspense and tension as well as a number of effective plot twists, especially after the fifth episode and the viewers should brace themselves for a grand twist concerning the true identity of the Reptile. The show ends in a cliffhanger and I hope that we will have the chance to watch what happens next in a new, third season.

The performances are more than decent and once again Dadakaridis nails his role as the autistic criminalist who becomes a pawn in a game that he struggles to comprehend before it's too late. Nousias and Lagoutis are convincing as the police officers in charge of the whole operation while Vakousis has a much smaller role than he had in the previous season. Dimitris Kapetanakis is worthy of a special mention as he is excellent in the role of the small-time enforcer, Alkis Masatos. His interactions with Sotiris (Sotiris Tsafoulias) are hilarious and offer a brief comic relief to the overall bleak story. Veteran actor Spyros Papadopoulos plays once again the Police Commissioner and the stunning Vicky Papadopoulou returns as the nosy journalist Christina Stergiou.

Of course, as it happens with every show, there are some flaws regarding mainly the depiction of certain institutions like the prison which is closer to the Star Trek saga than the contemporary Greek reality. Nevertheless, this is a work of fiction and the audience should suspense the disbelief in order to be able to enjoy the viewing experience. The overall aesthetic result is ravishing and this is what matters first and foremost. The make-up team did a tremendous job, equal to that of the biggest productions in the U.S. and the rest of Europe. I am really proud as a Greek to review a television show that is binge-worthy and I truly hope that there will be more. Thank you Sotiris Tsafoulias!