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By Caryn JamesFeatures correspondent
HBOJodie Foster is on ‘bracing’ form in True Detective: Night Country, a creepy, suspenseful new series that is tinged with the supernatural.
In the opening credits of True Detective: Night Country, a small stuffed-toy polar bear, a graveyard full of crosses and a clothed body falling into the sea emerge under a chilly midnight-blue sky, as the soundtrack plays Billie Eilish’s haunting Bury a Friend (“Bury a friend, try to wake up… I want to end”). Liz Danvers – Jodie Foster, in a bracing performance – is the brittle, acerbic police chief in the small town of Ennis, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. During a winter period when the sun never rises, and night lasts for weeks, she investigates after the eight scientists living at a research centre suddenly vanish, all at once. With eerie suspense, vibrant characters and a layer of the supernatural, the series’ creator and director, Issa López, gives Night Country a singular feeling, and those opening credits suggest how: this show gets really creepy, in a good way. The original season of True Detective (2014), with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, set high expectations. After two much weaker follow-ups, this fourth season finally lives up to the exhilarating promise of the first.
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Liz is utterly rational, with a sardonic wit that leavens the series’ darkness. Foster’s talent for making stern characters sympathetic and likable – or at least understandable – shapes her. The film teases out her backstory, including why she was transferred to Ennis as some kind of professional punishment, forced to move there with her belligerent adolescent stepdaughter.
In True Detective fashion, there is a second, equally important heroine who partners with Liz on the case. Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) – almost always called by her last name – a State Trooper of Native Inupiaq heritage, grew up partly in Ennis, and is as instinctive as Liz is rational. She has her own tragic history. Reis, a champion boxer before she became an actor, has made only two small films, but her relative inexperience never shows as she matches Foster in intensity.
The women’s relationship is fraught and mysterious, teased out as effectively as their individual backstories. Basically, they hate each other. Something went very wrong between them in the past, and an old case they worked on together casts an inescapable shadow over the new one.
López meticulously plots and paces the series’ trajectory. The missing scientists’ whereabouts are discovered at the end of episode one, but that is just the beginning of the investigation. The more the police unravel, the more tangled the mystery becomes. How might it be related to the unsolved murder of a Native woman years before, a case that has obsessed Navarro – and that Liz is eager to leave behind? Why was that long-dead victim’s severed tongue found at the empty research centre? And how might her murder be related to her protests at the local mining company, which is still polluting the local water supply? Or maybe none of that applies.
The supporting cast is as sharp as the stars. Finn Bennett is vivid and convincing as Peter Prior, a smart and good-hearted young policeman who idolises Liz, jumping when she calls so much that it jeopardises his marriage. Peter’s father, Hank (John Hawkes) is also a member of the force, disgruntled that Liz is his boss. Evidently, he is not the source of Peter’s good nature. “We want him alive,” Liz tells Hank when they go after a suspect, and Hank says, “Do we?” It’s a line that resonates, not necessarily where you expect it to.
López, who has worked mostly in Mexican film and television, is new to the show and has said that she first proposed Night Country as a series without having the True Detective framework in mind until HBO suggested it. She did a brilliant job of retrofitting the idea. Night Country has the DNA of the original, with Liz and Navarro echoing the fraught-but-tight relationship between the detectives who Harrelson and McConaughey played, and with the first season’s supernatural tinge.
But cultish ideas in season one were held by murder suspects. In Night Country the entire town and culture is imbued with spirituality and the belief that inexplicable things can have otherworldly causes, beliefs often but not only held by the Native people in Ennis. The series is filled with symbols and images. A dead man, either imagined or an actual apparition, points toward the location of corpses. A spiral symbol is tattooed on some people’s heads and on a rock. In the first episode, before the men vanish, one of them says cryptically, frightened, “She’s awake.”
As the darkness drags on, the characters become more and more out of control. Episode five ends with a real shocker, and the sixth and final episode includes a claustrophobic crawl through an ice tunnel under the frozen surface of the land, all effectively sending shivers. The final episode also includes a blunt call back to True Detective season one that will tickle anyone with even a vague memory of the original.
In that last episode, it may be hard to buy what caused the men’s vanishing act, an explanation that leaves you thinking, Really? Despite that, Lopez has taken inspiration from True Detective, and created a fierce, absorbing, richly imagined new show of her own.
★★★★★
True Detective: Night Country is released on Max in the US on 14 January and on Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK on 15 January.
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