True Detective - Night Country

Native Tongue

True Detective - 
Night Country
Season 4
HBO 2024
6 episodes

Warning: Some spoilers

After a strong opening with a supernatural atmosphere where a herd of deer are startled, True Detective - Night Country, shows itself as being more of a reboot than a continuation at first, although there are some marked references going back to the characters in the first season of the show (reviewed by me here). The opening also has strong similarities to John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (reviewed here) as the whole thing is set in the fictional town of Ennis in Alaska, when a research team all go suddenly missing, after a big fright glimpsed at the start of the story. Also, to lend itself to the definite supernatural shenanigans going on, the whole thing is set from mid December through to early January, in the part of the year where the whole town is forever night. So, yeah, you won’t be seeing much daylight in this show other than the occasional flashback. 

And that’s another thing which marks this show out from the predecessors… it’s not being told in a fractured time narrative in any way, although there is a sense of looking back to a prior case. 

Enter Police Detective Liz Danvers played by Jodie Foster. When she finds the tongue of an old murder victim in the research station while everyone is missing, she realises it links up with a case with her old partner, now working for a different branch. That doesn’t stop that ex-partner, Evangeline Navarro, played by Kali Reis, from joining the investigation to try and help figure out how the two cases are related. Helping Danvers is her newish young sidekick Detective Peter Prior, played by Finn Bennett. Also among the cast are two actors who feel like they’ve been a bit wasted here. The great Christopher Eccleston plays an outranking superior officer who is not really on board with Danvers investigation but, it’s more like a series of cameos (he doesn’t even appear in the last, slightly extended episode).

And then there’s also Fiona Shaw as a native to the area, Rose Aguineau. Now I think this actress is great, especially after seeing her as the authority figure in Killing Eve (reviewed here, here,  here and here) but, again she’s more of a cameo, ‘five minutes and you’re done’, presence in each episode. That being said, her character, who knows the history and folklore of the area, is at least a more significant person and is even the one who, at the end of the first episode… and with the help of the spirit of her dead husband… finds the frozen bodies of the dead scientists, half mutilated and naked in the snow. 

Well, not all dead because, when the cops are trying to remove the bodies from the ice, one of the guy’s arms cracks off and that’s when we find out there was one survivor… when he starts screaming at this. And asides from the occasional goriness (head shot squibs are getting much better), there is much more an emphasis on the supernatural as accepted by the majority of the population there (except Danvers, naturally, who has to be confronted by it several times before she starts to accept things), giving this season a very different, horror movie vibe. But it’s also shot through with, often black, humour… for instance, after a retort is made to Peter about the way he does everything for Danvers, he finds himself asking, “Who’s Mrs. Robinson?”

So there’s a slow creeping dread going on throughout the entire show and, juxtaposed with the more realistic procedural story which the characters are wrapped up in, it makes for an interesting mix. And it’s well acted, especially by Kali Reis but also, of course, by Foster. In fact, Danvers is a deliberately unlikeable character and so it took me a while before I could start warming to her, as Foster brings out the person beneath the surface as the story continues 

That being said, all of the detectives on the case seem to be missing the one obvious question, filled with mystery, which I picked up on from a screen saver at the research centre early on in the first episode. If this place is supposed to have a highly advanced research team, why the heck are they watching films on a DVD player rather than a Blu Ray player? It makes no sense!

The ending is… ambiguous. A, mostly, human intervention reason for the deaths of all the scientists is given but there’s also room left for unexplained elements which could have… and probably did… contribute to the deaths. Even the final fate of Evangeline Navarro is left open to interpretation… is she in the final shot with Danvers or did she kill herself and then rejoined Danvers as her spirit (as seems to happen a lot in Ennis, it seems… the dead rarely seem to be resting). And, yeah, overall I liked this season, written and directed by a new show runner. I think Night Country and the first season rank the highest in my experience of True Detective, for sure. 

But, of course, like everyone else, I’m wondering when the next cast will be coming along for a sixth season. Well… rumours are I’m going to have to wait ’til 2027 to see the next story so, yeah, I’ll keep my eye on that, for sure.