Baked into the icy wastes of Ennis, Alaska, are secrets even the dead never share.
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An isolated research station sits empty in the aftermath of an eerie attack captured on smart phone. Scientists who once studied the permafrost sit slack jawed and frozen solid into an Arctic ice sculpture, now no more than a mass of twisted limbs and contorted terror ripped from Dante’s Inferno. Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) surveys the scene as her prodigy Pete Prior (Finn Bennett) tries to process this Old Testament effigy made flesh, while lesser professionals take selfies with the unwilling victims and goof off. Until that is, things go south and season four of True Detective kicks up a notch when the Night Country comes calling.
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Unpacked with all the precision of a seasoned professional, show runner Issa Lopez introduces audiences to this complicated community by weaving complex relationships between the snow drifts. Fathers and sons are awkwardly at ease, secret trysts relieve tension when the pressures of home life become too much, while industrial pollutants poison people in their sleep and research funding is pumped into the permafrost.
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Held together by a disparate collection of broken souls, Night Country pays homage to The Thing through an almost suffocating sense of prolonged tension as this community gradually buckles under the weight of its own secrets. Professional agendas and personal prejudice clash on a daily basis, as those who live within the rabbit warren of Ennis rely on routine and relationships to eke out an existence. The sacrificial nature of this crime which defines Night Country is almost academic in terms of creating drama, as counterculture academics exist alongside an indigenous population personified through Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), who give this town a sense of immortality that goes beyond world building.
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Any horror that exists through the events that unfold in this superior season, come down to those interconnections between Hank Prior (John Hawkes) and his son Pete, or those moments of candour that pass for conversation with Liz Danvers and Ted Corsaro (Christopher Eccleston). As the layers are peeled back and audiences delve deeper into those icy depths, True Detective: Night Country gives more away through those minor interactions than anything as blatant as a blow from a blunt instrument.
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Every single performance that ties this show together is worth mentioning, whether it might be Fiona Shaw as Rose Aguineau, Isabella LaBlanc opposite Jodie Foster as her adopted daughter Leah, or the fleeting presence of Eddie Qavvik (Joel Montgrand) who reveals the humility that exists beneath Navarro’s Teflon coated persona. Giving Night Country a moral centre amidst the impropriety of agenda driven behaviour and indiscriminate violence that defines the series, as audiences come to understand what it is about True Detective that makes it such an essential piece of drama.
True Detective: Night Country is available to stream on Sky Atlantic and NOWTV.