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Ennis, Alaska, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A place so remote that even the sun doesn’t reach it in deepest winter. Here, in the oppressive darkness, nightmares are indistinguishable from waking horror. Despair is in the mist; death is in the snow.
Welcome to Night Country. And welcome back, more broadly, to the tenebrous world of True Detective. The fourth season of the HBO anthology series marks the first outing in five years, Issa López having now taken over as showrunner from Nic Pizzolatto. A significant reset, then, but also a long-anticipated return to form for a show that slumped from appointment viewing to outright disappointment after its outstanding debut. Now as then the atmosphere is unnerving, the cynicism towards humankind bracing, and the central relationships charged and complex.
There are elements of this six-part instalment that evoke the first season — from the cultish undertones, to the way a cold case is re-examined in light of a chilling new crime by a pair of sparring partners. But like the snow that never stops falling in Ennis, López has a way of making well-trodden paths seem fresh with a standalone story that’s as much a masterfully-executed thriller as it is a portrait of people living on the edge. Geographically, culturally, mentally.
The main plot follows a disturbing mystery involving a group of scientists from a polar research centre who are found frozen under snow in a tableau mort of anguished faces and writhing bodies. To no-nonsense police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), this is a “shitbowl case” which will yield no answers. That doesn’t stop her from obsessing over questions like who these men were, how they wound up in this grotesque arrangement, and what the severed tongue of a local indigenous woman murdered six years earlier was doing at their station.
Assisting Danvers in the investigation is the equally steely Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). A former detective who worked on the aforementioned homicide, she was since demoted by Danvers after another case went wrong. But while the cause of their enmity adds intrigue, the show is ultimately more interested in their shared experience and their unspoken understanding of the losses they have both endured.
If the trauma-troubled cop is something of a trope, then López and her leads ensure that the characters feel lived rather than written. Foster is unsurprisingly stellar, yet it’s Reis, a champion boxer-turned-actor, who stands out with her commanding but vulnerable turn in a demanding role that frames Navarro as both an authority figure and outsider as a Native American woman.
Throughout the show, López adjusts her scope from matters of individual identity, to the struggles of a community bereft of hope and cohesion, to sweeping existential ideas about what gives us meaning and what lies beyond. And though the hint of supernatural forces may feel like a slight cop-out in a police drama, the mystical doesn’t seem too out of place in this most uncanny part of the world. As a character pithily puts it: “it’s a long fucking night, even the dead get bored.”
★★★★☆
On Sky Atlantic from January 15 at 2am/9pm. New episodes air weekly and streaming on NOW. On HBO and MAX in the US
