True Detective: Night Country, Sky Atlantic review ★★★★★
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis star in the dark and ghostly fourth season of True Detective, set in Alaska during a polar night. Christopher Eccleston and Fiona Shaw also star
Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country, Sky Atlantic / NOW (Photo: Sky/HBO)
Episodes watched: 6 of 6
Suspense is overrated when compared with dread. Dread is the body shaped from furniture in the dark, the ripples in the water you see before drowning. This kind of horror penetrates to the soul rather than stopping at the amygdala. True Detective: Night Country uses the cold and darkness to reach those buried places, carving an intense murder mystery out of black ice.
Relocating from the heat and sunshine of previous seasons, this iteration permafrosts your senses in nocturnal Alaska. Specifically: 150 miles from the Arctic Circle, in a snow-smothered town called Ennis. Around mid-December, the region plunges into a state of constant night over several ‘days’ (recalling David Slade's forgotten vampire movie 30 Days of Night). And this is just one of many dreadful circumstances that weather the weird case at the centre. Night Country trudges through ghosts, grief and generational trauma in a nightmarish blizzard.
Kali Reis and Jodie Foster as detectives Evangeline Navarro and Liz Danvers. Photo: Sky/HBO
Filmmakers often revert to the Lynchian when tackling the dream-like. But writer/creator/director Issa López – replacing former showrunner Nic Pizzolatto – prefers to embrace Stanley Kubrick’s ghost hotel classic The Shining and John Carpenter’s paranoid alien horror The Thing. The latter is especially unavoidable in Night Country: opening in an Arctic Research Centre, in which eight climate scientists endure an invisible threat.
All of them vanish, only to be found later on the ice. Frozen. Dead. Screaming. It’s a surreal image, a sculpture of pure fright, plucked from a brilliantly twisted imagination. But how did these scientists arrive in this state, and who is responsible?
Local detective Liz Danvers (a nails-tough Jodie Foster, miles from the naivety of Clarice Starling) might not consider those the right questions. She’s the lead on this strange and violent mystery, loosely inspired by the Mary Celeste and the Dyatlov Pass incident. Danvers’ former police partner Evangeline Navarro (a spirited breakthrough from Kali Reis) returns to her orbit, believing the gruesome ‘corpsicle’ is connected to the murder of Native woman Annie K – a vocal protestor against the nearby corporate mine.
Fiona Shaw as Rose. Photo: Sky/HBO
Similar to Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) in season one, Danvers is a cynical, misanthropic atheist while Navarro is in touch with her spiritual side. But their divisions reach further: the white Danvers struggles to care about cultural heritage and the Iñupiaq Navarro grapples with her own disconcerted sense of racial identity.
Their conversations don’t dig into the same philosophical depths as those by Rust and Marty. But the existentialism colours the long and chilly night around them, affecting the community like a collective cabin fever. Spectres sweep in and out as fast as the bitter breeze: hiding, pointing, shouting. But is this because the town is ‘where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams’, as the reclusive Rose (a vaguely witchy Fiona Shaw) describes? Or does the setting provoke these neurochemical reactions via the guilt in life and the fear of death?
Thankfully, matching Kubrick’s sense of ominous ambiguity, López doesn’t pick a side. She crafts a haunting psychological experience with recurrent, uncanny objects that permeate your subconscious. This is bolstered by the song choices, ranging from Johnny Cash to Billie Eilish (bury a friend serves as the title theme), as well as tribal chants during more vengeful scenes.
Photo: Sky/HBO
Six episodes are not nearly enough to spend in that space, beautifully, mythically, poetically shot by TÁR and Pachinko cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister. But the immediacy captures the confused pace of a dream, gliding through so many dissociative elements that follow the characters around like phenomenological tethers; shadows of themselves.
Although Night Country won’t reach the same cultural status as season one, it is the most compelling chapter of True Detective since McConaughey, Harrelson and Pizzolatto changed the game for prestige television. It's a horrifying, thoughtful and semi-phantasmagorical victory for the series, complete with icy wraiths to invade your dreams.
True Detective: Night Country airs on Monday 15 January at 9pm on Sky Atlantic and NOW.
Suspense is overrated when compared with dread. Dread is the body shaped from furniture in the dark, the ripples in the water you see before drowning. This kind of horror penetrates to the soul rather than stopping at the amygdala. True Detective: Night Country uses the cold and darkness to reach those buried places, carving an intense murder mystery out of black ice.
Relocating from the heat and sunshine of previous seasons, this iteration permafrosts your senses in nocturnal Alaska. Specifically: 150 miles from the Arctic Circle, in a snow-smothered town called Ennis. Around mid-December, the region plunges into a state of constant night over several ‘days’ (recalling David Slade's forgotten vampire movie 30 Days of Night). And this is just one of many dreadful circumstances that weather the weird case at the centre. Night Country trudges through ghosts, grief and generational trauma in a nightmarish blizzard.
Kali Reis and Jodie Foster as detectives Evangeline Navarro and Liz Danvers. Photo: Sky/HBO
Filmmakers often revert to the Lynchian when tackling the dream-like. But writer/creator/director Issa López – replacing former showrunner Nic Pizzolatto – prefers to embrace Stanley Kubrick’s ghost hotel classic The Shining and John Carpenter’s paranoid alien horror The Thing. The latter is especially unavoidable in Night Country: opening in an Arctic Research Centre, in which eight climate scientists endure an invisible threat.
All of them vanish, only to be found later on the ice. Frozen. Dead. Screaming. It’s a surreal image, a sculpture of pure fright, plucked from a brilliantly twisted imagination. But how did these scientists arrive in this state, and who is responsible?
Local detective Liz Danvers (a nails-tough Jodie Foster, miles from the naivety of Clarice Starling) might not consider those the right questions. She’s the lead on this strange and violent mystery, loosely inspired by the Mary Celeste and the Dyatlov Pass incident. Danvers’ former police partner Evangeline Navarro (a spirited breakthrough from Kali Reis) returns to her orbit, believing the gruesome ‘corpsicle’ is connected to the murder of Native woman Annie K – a vocal protestor against the nearby corporate mine.
Fiona Shaw as Rose. Photo: Sky/HBO
Similar to Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) in season one, Danvers is a cynical, misanthropic atheist while Navarro is in touch with her spiritual side. But their divisions reach further: the white Danvers struggles to care about cultural heritage and the Iñupiaq Navarro grapples with her own disconcerted sense of racial identity.
Their conversations don’t dig into the same philosophical depths as those by Rust and Marty. But the existentialism colours the long and chilly night around them, affecting the community like a collective cabin fever. Spectres sweep in and out as fast as the bitter breeze: hiding, pointing, shouting. But is this because the town is ‘where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams’, as the reclusive Rose (a vaguely witchy Fiona Shaw) describes? Or does the setting provoke these neurochemical reactions via the guilt in life and the fear of death?
Thankfully, matching Kubrick’s sense of ominous ambiguity, López doesn’t pick a side. She crafts a haunting psychological experience with recurrent, uncanny objects that permeate your subconscious. This is bolstered by the song choices, ranging from Johnny Cash to Billie Eilish (bury a friend serves as the title theme), as well as tribal chants during more vengeful scenes.
Photo: Sky/HBO
Six episodes are not nearly enough to spend in that space, beautifully, mythically, poetically shot by TÁR and Pachinko cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister. But the immediacy captures the confused pace of a dream, gliding through so many dissociative elements that follow the characters around like phenomenological tethers; shadows of themselves.
Although Night Country won’t reach the same cultural status as season one, it is the most compelling chapter of True Detective since McConaughey, Harrelson and Pizzolatto changed the game for prestige television. It's a horrifying, thoughtful and semi-phantasmagorical victory for the series, complete with icy wraiths to invade your dreams.
True Detective: Night Country airs on Monday 15 January at 9pm on Sky Atlantic and NOW.
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| What | True Detective: Night Country, Sky Atlantic review |
| When |
15 Jan 24 – 15 Jan 25, ON SKY ATLANTIC / NOW |
| Price | £n/a |
| Website | Click here for more information |