Screens/Reviews

True Detective: Night Country
Where: Crave
What: Series, Season 4, six episodes, 55 mins.
When: Sun., Jan. 14; new episodes weekly
Genre: Drama
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Creepy and compelling with superb performances, the best True Detective since the masterful 2014 debut of this anthology series.

I WAS IN ICELAND in 2022, just as Jodie Foster and crew started filming the latest season of the anthology crime series True Detective. While locals were excited about the shoot, nothing about this excellent series, shot during nonstop winter darkness, is likely to encourage anyone to visit the amazing island.

While shot in Iceland, True Detective: Night Country is set in mid-December Alaska, just as the region is slipping into 24-hour darkness. It proves the perfect locale for the fourth instalment of this unsettling crime series, which was brilliantly launched in 2014 by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in the steamy Deep South.

A key to the show’s success is the relationship, often rocky, between the two lead detectives. This time we get a hard-to-like small-town police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), who has been “exiled” to Ennis, AK; and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a much more sympathetic Alaska State Trooper of Indigenous Inupiaq heritage, herself pushed off the local force.

Foster is icily magnificent as a no-nonsense cop who has little time for nurturing her Indigenous step-daughter and boxer-turned-actor Reis holds her own in her many scenes opposite the Oscar-winning star.

The eerie blue-black darkness of almost perpetual night contrasted with the white snow proves the perfect setting for the cops to investigate the mysterious deaths of eight scientists, frozen to death naked and outdoors, who were working at a remote research station outside the town.

Concurrently, Navarro has continued to investigate the mysterious death of an Indigenous woman, a case that Danvers has seemed to abandon. Eventually, a link between the deaths emerges.

Both Navarro and Danvers are haunted by their pasts with a general “haunting” hanging over the proceedings as we’re left to muse whether the crimes are paranormal or just “Night Country normal.”

A sketchy local mine operation and unscrupulous mine owner (herself with a serious beef against Danvers, who slept with her husband) is battling the local Indigenous population, who is certain the mine is polluting the community

While Nic Pizzolatto, the creative originator of the True Detective franchise, stepped away from a leadership role this season, writer and director Issa López has taken over and managed to create an update that is true to the original’s unsettling and winning approach.

Foster and Reis, as well as an excellent supporting cast, give compelling performances that live up to and build on the show’s original premise, making this season perfect viewing for the dark cold months ahead — just don’t watch it alone.