True Detective: Night Country

HBO and HBO Go
4 stars

This is how you do a prestige crime drama.

First, make sure the main characters – the cops – carry defects of character caused by a horrific event in their past. Better yet, give the entire community trauma, a pain that unites them and keeps their lips sealed.

Throw in mutterings about curses and ghosts and include shots that show a landscape heavy with foreboding. Whip back and forth between two or three timelines in every episode and finish with terse, allusive dialogue.

Since the first season of True Detective (2014), this formula has earned it a clutch of Emmy and Critics’ Choice awards. But the acclaim has cooled off somewhat since the high of Season 1, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as the cops of the title.

Now, three episodes into the anthology series’ fourth season – new episodes air every Monday – it feels as if part of the old magic is back.

Mexican director Issa Lopez made the acclaimed fantasy-horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) and knows how to create an atmosphere heavy with evil.

Here is why Night Country is worthy of a binge.

1. Great cop characters

Each season opens with a fresh crime, cast and setting. Perhaps unfairly, the new cops are always compared with the magnificent first season’s sleuths, the haunted duo played by McConaughey and Harrelson.

As if to make sure viewers forget the male angst that weighed heavy on the first three seasons (Season 2 was headlined by Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams, and Season 3 by Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff), the fourth features a pair of women crime-solvers: Jodie Foster, in a rare television appearance, is paired with relative newcomer Kali Reis, a title-winning boxer-turned-actress.

Foster’s police chief Liz Danvers is ultra-competent, but faces misogynistic pushback from the largely blue-collar white community of the mining town of Ennis, Alaska.

From the native Inupiat people, she gets hostility for raising an adopted Inupiat daughter free of what she considers superstitious native mumbo-jumbo.

Reis’ Evangeline Navarro is a part-Inupiat state trooper caught between two worlds – one that requires her to enforce white laws and another that calls for her to respect her indigenous heritage.

2. An icy hell

Lopez has cited the influence of the classic horror work The Thing (1982), and the arctic wastes of Ennis evoke the film’s claustrophobic atmosphere.

Every crime-solving step has to be weighed against the facts of the killing climate – corpses need a thawing-out before samples can be taken; forensic pathologists fly in only when the weather permits; and evidence is conveniently preserved when the outdoors is a giant freezer.

The cold outside is matched by the iciness of the human relationships.

There is a lack of trust between the whites, who run everything, and the native Inupiat, who see themselves as displaced and forgotten by the system, especially by the corporation which operates the mine that is poisoning their water.

The murders of indigenous women get scant attention from the authorities.

3. A properly spooky mystery

A group of men from a research station has gone missing and, without giving too much away, the crime can be described as one of gruesome beauty.

The mystery is drenched in religious-mystical trappings, in a nod to the killings of the first season, where the corpses of women were found dressed and posed in attitudes of worship.

With only three episodes aired, it is hard to see if the tone of supernatural horror will be developed further into something concrete or if it will turn out only to be the product of scared minds seeing things in the arctic dark.

This season, the police procedural is easier to follow because the non-linear storytelling that marked the first season and made the third season tough to follow has been damped down. There are occasional flashbacks, but otherwise everything takes place in the here and now.