Mixing crime procedural, chafing buddy cop dynamics, existential philosophizing, and eerie supernatural tinges, “True Detective” dazzled audiences in 2014 with its mesmerizing first season, helping usher in a new, post-“Sopranos” golden age of auteur-driven, A-list star-laden prestige TV (along with 2013’s David Fincher-driven “House Of Cards,” Jane Campion’s “Top Of The Lake,” and all the other shows that followed). Still led and written by creator Nic Pizzolatto, seasons two and three lacked a consistent cinematic vision, and their wandering narratives left audiences wanting. So, the belated and superb fourth season, “True: Detective: Night Country,” makes the virtually unimpeachable case that the “True Detective” franchise demands a commanding authoritative vision at its center. Directed, written, showrun, and produced by Mexican filmmaker Issa López (“Tigers Are Not Afraid”), if the filmmaker hadn’t yet been bestowed the title of auteur before, her intensely ambitious, complex, and utterly haunting ‘Night Country,’ should cement that label forever more.
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Her ‘Night Country’ is captivating from the jump. Utilizing some cinematic inspiration from John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” Jonathan Demme’s “Silence Of The Lambs,” and David Fincher’s “Seven,” while still feeling like a wholly original work—like a sprawling whodunnit Western taking place in the eerie enigmatic artic—López returns “True Detective” to its roots while simultaneously turning the series inside out, making for a series that feels familiar (in the best way possible), while still totally unique. But López leans into her own heritage, Mexican culture’s predisposition towards celebrating, embracing, and acknowledging the dead, something that feels spiritually akin to Guillermo del Toro’s similar creative preoccupations, to make the show feel truly distinct (with a Lovecraftian mood of the macabre too). The night country and the dead are always calling, whispering, and crying out in López’s spellbinding version of ‘True Detective.’
Employing the tensions of partners-in-conflict trope, ‘Night Country’ is set in the fictional Alaskan mining town of Ennis, and follows Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis of “Catch the Fair One”), two cops marked by tragedies, who worked a murder-suicide case years ago, had a falling out over it, and have purposefully put as much distance between each ever since.
But the unnerving, unexplainable disappearance of eight men who were operating the Tsalal Arctic Research Station unintentionally softens the wedge and reunites the two police officers, especially as it tangentially relates to an unsolved murder of a local indigenous activist, Annie Kowtok, a case so brutal and cruel it has troubled and obsessed Navarro for years.
Navarro is instinctive and intuitive with a spiritual bent connected to the land, the environment, the people, past and present. Danvers is the polar opposite: analytical, methodical, all about asking the right procedural questions, but an unrelenting hard ass so preoccupied with her job that she’s alienated everyone around her. Blind to the customs and ways of the indigenous community around her, she’s obliviously pushed herself further into unlikeable outsider status. In short, her personal life is a hot mess, and it’s presented unapologetically as such.
Initially, the deeply skeptical and perpetually disagreeable Danvers is unconvinced the case of the missing Tsalal researchers has anything to do with the murder of Annie Kowtok, a case that went cold years ago. Eventually, the implacable Navarro keeps pulling at this thread, and the detectives begin to uncover engrossing connections that even the dubious Danvers can’t ignore. A tenuous and uneasy partnership is reformed, and ‘Night Country’ commences to further engross with an eerie, sinister, and riveting story that takes on conspiratorial dimensions about the environment while engaging in several sub-narratives about broken, toxic family dynamics, troubled pasts, and each detective confronting the darkness with themselves.
Empathy and a lack of it also define the two women at the center of this chilly tale. Danvers is completely oblivious to people, culturally, emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise—though her one loving contradiction is her penchant for detective mentoring— while Navarro, who has a hard, impenetrable exterior, has a warm center of compassion at her core, an essence of sympathy that extends beyond the various traumas she’s faced.
Delving further into the plot will only rob you of the joys in the narrative’s unexpected twists and turns, but family and mothers play a critical role, too. Navarro is constantly checking in on her troubled sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), still reeling from the death of their mom, and the mounting tensions between Danvers and her activist indigenous stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc) are constantly growing and driving them apart. Other key players in the suspenseful drama include an ominous and unscrupulous cop, Hank Prior (John Hawkes), his idealistic son and Danvers’ eager protégé Peter Prior (Finn Bennett), the spiritual doyenne figure Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw), and Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston), a superior who threatens to move the murder case under Anchorage jurisdiction due to Danvers’ dogged sense of being inherently difficult.
All its characters are three-dimensional, complex, and sometimes contradictory people, multifaced, believable, and superbly rendered by actors like Foster, Reis, and Hawkes, the third standout of all the supporting players. But it’s arguably Lopez’s spine-chilling fascination with the dead, the departed, and the creepy supernatural influences that truly make ‘Night Country’ an evocative ghostly experience. Wisely, the bizarre, paranormal, and occult elements of ‘Night Country,’ as much as they are about the dead, spirits, and their unresolved issues with the living, are still ambiguous and obscure, difficult to pinpoint exactly in the same way it’s hard to define an otherworldly experience.
‘Night Country’ has a few easter eggs that connect it to season one, too, links and associations that will delight fans of the original series. But more importantly, the spirit of Carcosa is evoked, the parallel concepts of the unnatural, the mysterious, and the unknowable that defy explanation (and the way López constructs some of the deceased elements as heartfelt, those who do not wish to harm us, but truly miss us beyond expression is unexpectedly poignant).
“True Detective” doesn’t feature the thought-provoking theorizing and existential sermonizing of McConaughey’s character in season one, but it does feature the character-appropriate equivalent with characters in cars espousing their worldviews, albeit in a more working-class perspective this time.
Tackling ideas of race, class, exploitation, abuse, the secrets of tight-knit communities, the legacy of colonialism, interlopers, environmentalism, climate change, and more alongside the main thread of the murder mystery ‘Night Country’ is deep and rich—a thoughtful consideration of its setting, the people who live on its land and their various social and emotional anxieties and concerns. And while there’s resolution to the show’s mystery, none of it is neat and clean, with dangling threads left not only to intrigue but more indicative of the natural rhythms of life.
One ‘True Detective’ staple that ‘Night Country’ wisely jettisons is the time-shifting gaps that have been a series hallmark (think Matthew McConaughey as a young cop in season one and then fast-forwarding decades ahead to the character as a grizzled, more paranoid veteran). While the narrative trademark of revisiting the same case years later worked in season one, it enervated seasons two and three, and this part of the ‘True Detective’ formula is sensibly discarded in favor of something more linear and taut.
Shot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister (“Tár,” “Antlers,” “The Terror”), ‘Night Country’ is obviously cold in its aesthetic, but the subzero, uncanny expression goes beyond the icy, always evocative of the supernatural contours López continuously inks around the stories edges visually and spiritually.
Not quite horror, but spinetingling, not quite straightforward thriller, but still gripping, and leveraging elements of mystery and police procedural with relatably messy humans at its center, filmmaker Issa López has carefully crafted a modern-day crime classic that rivals “True Detective” season one in its addictive, enthralling qualities. Ultimately, her transfixing dark night of the soul drama grapples with the weight of the dead, their legacies, and the notions that none of us are ever truly gone. [A]
“True: Detective: Night Country” premieres January 14, 2024, on HBO and MAX.
