True Detective: Night Country Review: HBO's Crime Drama Returns to Form in Dark Fourth Season

When you've been a star for as long as Jodie Foster has, it's impossible not to evoke memories of past roles, and that's often not a bad thing. When Foster first shows up early in True Detective: Night Country as Liz Danvers, chief of police of the fictional far north Alaska mining town of Ennis, and immediately gets to work piecing together clues of a mysterious crime, it stirs a pleasant, Silence of the Lambs-inducedsense of deja vu. That both gives Foster a shortcut — of course her character is good at detective work — and allows her to play against expectations. Danvers is smart, tough, and detail oriented, but she's no Clarice Starling. She's acidic, sometimes reckless, and, as the season unfolds, we'll soon learn that most of the wives in Ennis have good reason not to like her very much.

Returning after a five-year absence, this season of True Detective bears an altered name and a new driving force. Best known in the English-speaking world for her 2017 horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid, Mexican author and director Issa López takes over for series creator Nic Pizzolatto, whose grim, philosophical sensibility defined the series's first three seasons. Which raises a question: Without that creative continuity, what makes True Detective: Night Country a season of True Detective? The question doesn't last for long. Even before characters start doubting the existence of God, Night Country feels of a piece with its predecessors. Set during the endless night of an Arctic winter, it's dark both literally and figuratively and concerns a crime as shocking as any dreamed up in previous seasons. 

It also features a memorable duo at its core. Foster gives this fourth season of True Detective a confident, commanding lead, but she's far from the only attraction. The cast is filled with recognizable names, like Fiona Shaw, Christopher Eccleston, and John Hawkes, but it's boxer/actor/writer Kali Reis as Danvers' partner, Evangeline Navarro, who gets the most screen time, delivering a memorable, coiled performance well matched to Foster's cutting, acerbic turn.

7.4

True Detective: Night Country

at HBO

Like

• Foster and Reis are another standout True Detective duo
• Showrunner Issa López's attention to detail makes the community vivid
• Fits tonally and thematically with the best of previous seasons
• Cinematography is memorably stark

Dislike

• The season feels too short
• Characters and setting eventually take a back seat to plot

Ennis is a town already troubled by clashes between a powerful mining company and the mostly Indigenous faction protesting a careless (and maybe actively hostile) environmental record that's poisoned the water supply and led to a series of stillborn deliveries. But the incident that drives Night Country seems, at first at least, far removed from those concerns. The series opens in an isolated research station that looks a bit like the luxury spa version of the outpost seen in John Carpenter's The Thing. (The show nods to the inspiration by prominently featuring a VHS copy of the movie on a station shelf, but the influence doesn't extend much further.) As the sun sets for the last time of the year, one of the outpost's scientists appears to have some kind of fit before delivering the ominous warning "She's awake." When Danvers arrives a few scenes later, she finds the station abandoned with no signs of human life — unless a severed tongue counts.

Danvers is accompanied by Peter (Finn Bennett), a deputy who both hero worships his boss and resents the job's demanding hours that keep him from his family, and Peter's cop dad Hank (Hawkes), a sloppy lifer who seems to be biding his time as he waits for a mail-order bride to arrive from Vladivostok. As it quickly becomes clear that the case won't be easily solved — a situation confirmed by the discovery of the scientists' naked bodies frozen together in the middle of a snowy wasteland — Danvers finds herself reluctantly paired with Navarro, a state trooper with whom she has a history. Also drawn into the case: Ted Connelly (Eccleston), the politically ambitious boss who assigned Danvers to Ennis in the first place. She shares a different sort of history with him.

Night Country doles out these backstories a little bit at a time, as well as the history that's brought Danvers to serve as a stepmother to Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), a high schooler who's beginning to act out as she explores her Native heritage. The pace of these revelations is occasionally frustrating, but they feel of a piece with the attention to detail López — who directs and writes or co-writes each of the season's six episodes — gives to Ennis. It's a town where everyone not only knows everyone else, but their lives overlap in multiple, sometimes messy ways. Danvers is Peter's boss, but Peter's home is also where Leah goes when her stepmom's not around to hang out with Peter's wife Kayla (Anna Lambe), where she also learns more about her heritage. Navarro regularly hooks up with Eddie (Joel Montgrand), a bar owner and black marketeer who employs Navarro's troubled sister Julia (Aka Niviâna). The web of relationships suggests a rich history that predates the events of the season and will continue after it concludes.

Night Country is at its best when it strikes a graceful balance between these personal stories and the mystery of the scientists' disappearance (and frozen reappearance), as both play out against a black background that threatens to swallow up Ennis and all who live there. (Shot in starkest Iceland, Night Country benefits greatly from the work of Tár cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.) That balance starts to shift as the season progresses and the needs of finishing the story start to overwhelm the characters and the place in which they live. It's the rare miniseries that feels an episode or two too short rather than a story padded out to fill a season.

Still, it's a memorable six episodes that offer a trip to a desolate place most of us will never visit and the perils unique to it. Hearkening back to the first season, True Detective: Night Country teases the possibility that the real danger may be supernatural and even features some quite real-seeming ghosts. But it's the evils humanity is capable of carrying out, and the difficulty of staying sane and kind in the midst of those evils, that serves as the series's true subject. And that may be a mystery beyond the skills of even the keenest investigator.

Premieres: Sunday, Jan. 14 at 9/8c on HBO and Max
Who's in it: Jodie Foster, Kari Reiss, John Hawkes
Who's behind it: Issa López
For fans of: Previous seasons, grim crime stories, dark snowy landscapes
How many episodes we watched: 6 of 6