Ten years after its groundbreaking first season set a new bar for prestige crime anthologies, True Detective is back with Night Country, the fourth installment helmed by acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Issa López. While not reaching the masterful heights of that cosmic horror-tinged Louisiana mystery, True Detective: Night Country course-corrects from the disappointing subsequent seasons to recapture some of that signature gritty atmosphere and thematic depth. However, it remains an uneven, flawed work – an admirable but imperfect feminist revision of the franchise’s core DNA.
From the haunting opening sequence alone, López makes her stylistic ambitions clear. As an isolated team of scientists at a remote Arctic research station suddenly disappear one by one, subsumed by unnatural forces in the darkness, Night Country establishes an aura of dread and otherworldly menace. When their naked, contorted bodies are discovered frozen together in ritualistic fashion on the harsh Alaskan tundra, we’re plunged into a twisting conspiracy possibly involving the reawakening of an ancient “feminine spirit.”
This unsettling supernatural layer weaves throughout the grim police procedural that follows, as hard-bitten local sheriff Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her former partner, state trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), are drawn into the baffling case. Ennis, Alaska is vividly rendered as an insular community gripped by the oppressive, months-long “polar night,” where the sun doesn’t rise and long-held secrets and resentments fester. The weathered, cynical Danvers clashes with the more open-minded, spiritual Navarro – herself grappling with her Indigenous heritage and family’s struggles with mental illness.
Their volatile investigation gradually reveals unsettling connections to the years-old murder of an Indigenous activist, heightening racial tensions with the threatened Inupiaq population who believe their land is being poisoned by an ominous mining company exploiting the region. As the mystery deepens, Navarro becomes obsessed with whispered local legends of the primordial “night mother” entity awakening to punish human desecration of her Arctic domain.
López has cited her desire to construct a “mirror image” of prior True Detective seasons – swapping the typical hot, “sweaty” and male-driven narratives for a cold, feminine perspective on the cycles of violence, exploitation, and marginalization facing women and Native populations in isolated, insular communities like Night Country’s Ennis. In this sense, her creative stamp and thematic ambition are laudable.
The series maintains the anthology’s tradition of richly drawn lead investigators unpacking their personal demons amid gnarled criminal conspiracies. Foster is outstandingly committed as the self-destructive but tenacious Danvers, delivering a powerfully layered turn evoking echoes of Clarice Starling but grounded in its own distinct characterization of ingrained prejudice, trauma and guilt. Her bristling chemistry with the more open, empathetic Navarro sparks consistently, even if their contrasting believer/skeptic dynamic grows simplistic at times.
In the supporting cast, Indigenous actress Kali Reis is a captivating presence as Navarro, believably embodying her fractured identity and turbulent spiritual awakening amid the paranormal phenomena. Her visceral performance roots the series’ more esoteric elements in something grounded and palpable. Strong work also comes from Fiona Shaw as a reclusive former professor haunted by ancestral spirits, and Isabella Star LaBlanc as Danvers’ estranged Indigenous activist stepdaughter.
Where Night Country stumbles is in failing to always cohere its ambitious thematic scope and convoluted tonal shifts into a satisfying whole. The writers’ eagerness to engage with every hot-button issue – from the pandemic’s toll on indigenous populations, to sexual abuse within tight-knit communities, to the corporatist rape of the natural world – results in an overstuffed narrative merging sincere commentary with heavy-handed sermonizing.
The muddled finale exemplifies this uneven approach, capping the paranormal mystery with the provocative heavy-handed image of the town’s wronged women taking bloody vengeance on their abusers/oppressors. It’s an arresting but clumsily executed climax, failing to resonate as either a subversive feminist statement or coherent narrative payoff to the season’s myriad, dangling threads and motifs.
Similarly, López’s embrace of supernatural elements marking a break from prior seasons proves a double-edged sword. While the omnipresent threat of malign Indigenous forces lends the setting a palpable unease, the abstract nature of this “night mother” is too vaguely sketched to achieve its full cosmic horror potential. Many creepy ghost cameos and tangential folk tale detours distract from the central murder mystery rather than enriching it.
True Detective: Night Country works best when its sense of dread arises from the fallible human characters and their fraught interplay, rather than the expected jump scares or ineffable spooky entities lurking offscreen. This grounds it in psychological realism, but López too often leans into cheesy schlock when that restraint might have yielded more disquieting results.
Stylistically, López oscillates between the visually arresting and the hamfisted. Her evocative conjuring of the harsh Arctic isolation and endless night invokes a chilling atmosphere, enhanced by the stark vistas and ghostly blue-tinged minimalism of her framing and lighting. Sinister escalating dread is further stoked through unnerving peripheral whispers and figures glimpsed at the corners of the screen.
However, the director too often leans into cheap shock tactics, indulging in-your-face horror money shots and jarring tonal pivots between grimdark philosophizing and ill-advised comedic detours (the frozen corpses at one point crudely propped up in a hockey rink). An awkward and tonally disjointed soundtrack of mournful pop covers further undercuts immersion.
Perhaps most damningly, despite its conceptual richness, True Detective: Night Country struggles at times to cohere its disparate elements – supernatural, procedural, cultural study – into a satisfying whole.
Too many storylines trail into dissatisfying resolutions or abrupt dead ends that leave the finale feeling scattered. The ultimate big “reveal” lands with an unceremonious thud.
There’s an undeniable overambition throughout, as if fearing yet another franchise misstep, López tried cramming in enough twists, weighty themes, and frenzied genre mash-ups to course-correct the entire past decade of True Detective’s bumpy trajectory into one densely packed season. For all its individual merits, Night Country ends up a muddled novelty – an admirably bold experiment that simply tries fusing too many narrative and stylistic plates into the air.
Which is perhaps a succinct critique of this season’s overall strengths and weaknesses. When it locks into its singular vision of an insulated community gripped in existential dread, True Detective: Night Country transfixes. Foster and Reis’ simmering partnership captivates. And López’s talent for conjuring an otherworldly atmosphere marks her as a genre auteur to watch.
But the writing too frequently overextends itself into clumsy didacticism and convolution. Thematic poignancy is sacrificed for cheap shocks and sitcom humor undercutting the intended catharsis. A myriad of compelling ideas and images battle for dominance until the entire narrative grows discordant in the strained effort to top itself at every turn.
In the end, True Detective: Night Country stands as a qualified success – a shaggy but intermittently mesmerizing return-to-form boasting visionary ambition if lacking in cohesive execution. For longtime fans seeking a return to existential mystery tinged with literary dread, López’s atmospheric study in cycles of colonial violence and intergenerational trauma refreshingly recenters True Detective’s id around a bracingly feminine perspective.
It may not quite recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle achievement of that landmark first season. But for those willing to embrace its admirably sprawling ambition, True Detective: Night Country offers enough tantalizing visions and thematic heft to mark a promising evolution for this anthology – flawed yet undeniably compelling, much like the chilling Arctic mysteries at its foreboding core.