Every season of True Detective has a sense of place. Season 1 took viewers to the humid swamps of Louisiana, followed by inland California and the Ozarks in seasons 2 and 3. The latest installment of the HBO crime anthology doesn’t just have a new location, but a new subtitle and creator, too. Credited to director and lead writer Issa López (with a “based on” acknowledging Nic Pizzolatto’s work on the first three seasons), True Detective: Night Country moves the series to the harsh Arctic region of Alaska, where the sun never rises between the winter solstice and New Year’s Day.
That’s not the only reason the series is subtitled Night Country. As with previous True Detectives, there’s an element of the supernatural at play here, this time with a ferocious feminine twist. As the chants at a protest in the fictional town of Ennis go, Inuit people lived in the area long before Ennis – and indeed Alaska itself – existed. And their legends still live alongside them, in the dark subterranean ice caves underneath the now-rapidly melting permafrost.
The concept for Night Country blends John Carpenter’s The Thing with a small-town police procedural: In the first episode, the men at the research station outside of town disappear en masse. The only clue to what might have happened to them is a cell phone video that captures a member of the team, twitching and shivering and seemingly possessed, ominously intoning: “She’s awake.” Then the lights go out, the first of many chilling and expertly crafted horror sequences in the show.
Then the men are discovered, naked and fused together in a nightmarish ice sculpture out on the tundra. Their faces are frozen in fear. Some of them have clawed their own eyes out. All are grotesque and frightening to look at, one of many smart decisions made by López and her crew in terms of Night Country’s horror craft. With that discovery, the missing-persons investigation led by Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), and deputy Hank Prior (John Hawkes), and Hank’s son and newbie cop Peter (Finn Bennett) becomes a murder case. The dynamics between the three officers are fraught, but not as much as the relationship between Danvers and her former partner Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a Native Alaskan who returned to the region as an adult after growing up in the lower 48.
There are quite a few characters in this show, all of them with their own storylines and personal demons. But, for the most part, López and her co-writers balance them well. Over six episodes, we feel as if we get to know most of the population of Ennis: Two highlights are Rose (Fiona Shaw), a reclusive ex-professor who accepts regular visits from the dead at her isolated cabin, and Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc), Liz’s stepdaughter, who clashes with Liz over Leah’s activism against the mine that’s poisoning the air and water around Ennis.
Like her hard-boiled male counterparts, Liz can be morally reprehensible. She drinks hard, uses men for sex, and taunts Evangeline with racist comments about “spirit animals” and clues coming to her in dreams – big, loud character notes that Foster handles with surprising nuance and sympathy. Reis may not have Foster’s range or lifetime of acting experience, but the role of Evangeline – whose struggle to come to terms with her Indigeneity and a family history of mental illness forms the spiritual core of the show – plays to her strengths. Reis is a former boxer, and brings an intense physicality to Evangeline’s tough exterior and inner angst, which expresses itself as aggression and anger.
There are moments of dark comedy – the dead scientists are placed in the local hockey rink to thaw in episode two, an absurd spectacle that again recalls Rob Bottin’s surrealist effects in The Thing – but, for the most part, the mood here is existential and bleak. (Sample dialogue: “We’re alone. God too.”) Where López really shines as a director is in the horror scenes, which are ghastly and freaky with a tinge of magical realism that recalls her underseen debut feature, Tigers Are Not Afraid. Ghosts are everywhere in Ennis, and López uses the permanent darkness of Arctic winter to great effect with scenes lit by flashlights, blinding whiteout snowfall, and lots of blue-green gloom.
There are moments when Night Country takes the easy storytelling path, and some of the callbacks to previous seasons are groan-worthy. But visually, on the page, and in the performances, this is bravura work from all involved. This is by far the best season of True Detective since the original, thoughtfully engaging with its location – special attention has been paid to small details, like the lack of fresh produce on the tundra – and the issues that affect the people there without sacrificing the intrigue of a good detective story. Like an icy cold wind, it chills to the bone.