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. 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.

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. 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. 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. They’re still out there, harbouring secrets Astrid’s imagination might be able to unlock. 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. 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. 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.

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.

Equinox netflix metacritic