True Detective: Night Country
Available on Now TV and Sky Atlantic
Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology series has always been an overly masculine affair, so its fourth instalment - which features two female leads and is written and directed entirely by Issa López - is immediately intriguing.
López has described it as a ‘dark mirror’ of True Detective’s seminal first season, with Kali Reis adopting Matthew McConaughey’s role as an unconventional and philosophical sleuth and Jodie Foster assuming Woody Harrelson’s position as her more traditional, but no less morally compromised, senior officer. However, the discomforting heat of Louisiana is here replaced by the perma-chill of the fictional town of Ennis in Alaska, from which the show lends its subtitle of Night Country.
From its onset, the series instantly showcases its influences. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a DVD copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing occupying the shelves of a remote research station in which the show’s central crime takes place, and soon learn that this is no coincidence. Indeed, this is a far more supernatural affair than previous anthologies, with both of the aforementioned detectives having to wrestle with the ghosts of their past while trying to solve the series’ enduring mystery, which also encompasses themes of climate change, gentrification, and police corruption.
Of course, all of these elements need to be carefully balanced in order for them to be meaningful, and this is a task that López struggles with, particularly as the show enters its final stretch. While the eventual resolution of her whodunit is unpredictable, it feels out of kilter with the events that precede it, which excitingly allude to the show entering a new thematic territory before disappointingly falling in line with much of what we have seen previously.
Nonetheless, Reis and in particular Foster ensure this entry of True Detective will be remembered for its central performances, with the latter giving us an anti-hero protagonist that is impossible to like but one you root for nonetheless.
