Review of the series True Detective: Night Country

The cult anthology series True Detective, whose first season gave all moviegoers an aesthetic orgasm, is finally back. The fourth season stars Jodie Foster (who is extremely nostalgic for fans of The Silence of the Lambs to see again as a detective stubbornly and desperately following the killer’s trail) and former professional boxer Kali Reis, a strikingly strong and textured girl who also has a remarkable dramatic talent.

For the first time in the True Detective anthology, both detectives were portrayed by women, and both characters turned out to be openly emancipated and brutal, but not in a stereotypical way, not in a way that fits into fashionable feminist clichés, but in a way that is original and deep, each immersed in their own different existence. For the first time, the True Detective season was released not under a number, but with an original subtitle. For the first time, the anthology closely intertwined realistic investigation with mysticism, with the echoes of something supernatural, otherworldly, incomprehensible, beyond the reach of forensics or any other science; for the first time, the detective was combined with horror. For the first time, the writer and showrunner of True Detective was not Nick Pizzolatto, who started this atmospheric series ten years ago; he was replaced by a woman, namely the Mexican author and director Issa Lopez.

By the way, after the premiere of the fourth season, Pizzolatto harshly criticized and even used the term True Detective: Night Country with such a rude epithet as “stupid”. The ex-project manager called the attempt of new authors to tie their story to his concept and his almanac “stupid”. It’s hard to say whether the writer was sincere in his scathing review, but to be honest, that bileful characterization looked like a banal insult for being fired. He was fired quite logically because the second and third seasons equally failed to meet high expectations after a triumphant start. He was fired and replaced, and by a woman.

Issa Lopez has indeed relaunched the True Detective franchise, reformatted and revised it. However, she definitely didn’t break its basic rules or distort the key features laid down by the expressive tandem of Louisiana cops played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey – she also created a thick, dense, rich atmosphere and told a true detective story in the same way…

This time, True Detective is set in a fictional town in Alaska, among the eternal Arctic glaciers, where all the researchers from the polar station mysteriously disappeared after the onset of the polar night. And at the site of the strange disappearance, among the abandoned personal belongings and bitten sandwiches, the police found a severed human tongue, which turned out to be the missing body part of a Native woman who had been brutally murdered six years ago. The woman had fiercely protested against the local mine because the mining caused black water to flow from the taps and children to be born dead. However, no clues were found (or no one wanted to look), and the case went to the archives, where it remained… until the researchers disappeared.

Night Country is based on a weave of reality, science and mythology, including the culture and beliefs of the Aleut, the indigenous people of Alaska. In the context of the central characters, the first strand of this braid is personified by the cynical, skeptical and atheistic heroine Jodie Foster, who represents the white “visitors” to the ice peninsula and who categorically does not believe in the supernatural, i.e. ghosts, spirits, shaman rituals, the connection between the living and the dead… who is sincerely convinced that it is not monsters, demons, or ghosts who are behind the murders, but flesh-and-blood killers. The second part of the weave is personified by the heroine Kali Reis, who believes and knows that here, at the edge of the world, where life is almost over and lonely and unrepentant polar bears wander as bizarre phantoms of the ancient night, the dead really come to the living… but she doesn’t know why.

One could, of course, accuse Issa Lopez of using a setting cliché: something terrible and sinister sleeps and wakes up in a deliberately favorable atmosphere of eternal bitter cold and pitch blackness, from which neither generators nor Christmas lights can save you. You could even say that True Detective: Night Country is secondary to such series as Fortitude or The Terror,, in particular the first season of another mystery anthology where an expedition gets stuck in the Arctic ice and encounters a monstrous spirit from Eskimo legends… or hallucinating on the verge of starvation and freezing death, and John Carpenter’s cult polar horror The Thing… Although in fact, Lopez imitates, but does not repeat; and falls into an extremely beautiful (horrible, but beautiful) existential decadence instead of just scaring with the help of darkness and winter.

Obviously, the point is not that darkness and studio hide supernatural monsters. It is about the fact that exactly where everything ends and where the primordial pristine eternal silence reigns, the essence of merciless and insurmountable human loneliness is at home. And no matter how one fights against this loneliness (both protagonists “fuck” heavy loneliness with light rough sex without feelings and obligations; someone seeks refuge in tender love for devoted malamutes; someone, like the naive character of John Hawkes, obsessed with finding a life-saving pill from the snow-white mill, falls for the outright “love” fraud of an Internet scammer from Vladivostok; and someone, like the mysterious old woman played by Fiona Shaw, on the contrary, flees from the noisy “normal” world here, to the abnormal “comfort” of dead voicelessness), she is still rooted here and lives, lives much longer than humanity.

Thanks to Issa Lopez’s impeccable vision, the primordial melancholy and primal emptiness that existed on this earth before us materialize. A one-eyed polar bear walks aimlessly through the streets. They melt together with the dirt ice sculpture, in which the dead mutilated bodies of researchers who searched for the origins of our “beautiful” life in the sterile void are bitterly ironically intertwined… And it really seems that there is neither heaven nor hell. There is only ice, “where dreams lead”.