Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Because the Night: Review of True Detective: Night Country
By Geoff Carter
While The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies typically focuses on—well, movies, we will occasionally stray into the realm of the small screen—which is not so small anymore, mostly because that since HBO premiered series like Oz, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos, small-screen production values have improved exponentially. Binge-watching has become a national pastime. Series like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Yellowstone, and The Wire are not only well-made compelling narratives, but have also become cultural touchstones.
While most of this programming follows the same characters through their (usually) traditional narrative arcs, True Detective switches settings and characters completely each season. The common thread running throughout all of them is the genre and intense psychological drama. These are detective stories, but they are not your grandma’s mysteries. They might more aptly be termed as psychological dramas with crimes (usually unusual and heinous crimes) attached.
The first season featured Detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) investigating a bizarre and seemingly ritualistic murder of a young woman. While Hart is more of traditional sort of cop, Cohle uses more of a philosophical sort of analysis to track down the killer. He is a spiritualist and an intellectual haunted by a checkered past as an undercover narcotics officer. As it dipped into Cohle’s beliefs—and Marty’s infidelities, and an intensely violent underworld, the investigation spanned both crime and pushed the envelope of spiritual consciousness. After the high bar of expectations set during the first season, the second and third installments were something of a disappointment. While the acting remained top notch, the narratives had little clarity and none of the shocking twists of the first.
The fourth Season, True Detective: Night Country, is set in the far north town of Ennis, Alaska on the eve of the winter solstice, the beginning of a two-month long night. Eight scientists from a local research station are found frozen on the tundra. None have clothes on, and all are preserved with expressions of utter horror. As they investigate the research station, Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and state trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) discover a severed tongue on the floor.
Because of an incident in their past, Danvers wants nothing to do with Navarro, and was, in fact, responsible for getting her transferred from her department after an incident stemming from a domestic abuse call. Navarro, a Native American, is attempting to reconcile the demands of her heritage, including her work, her familial duties, and the protests of the locals whose water is being contaminated by the local silver mine. The murder of Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pederson) who was repeatedly stabbed and had her tongue cut out, still haunts Navarro.
She is not alone in her pain. Despite Danvers’ protests, her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc), who wants to get in touch with her Native heritage.
Navarro is also dealing with her sister Julia (Aka Naviana) who suffers from schizophrenia and is often visited with visions of the dead. Navarro has visions of her own, including a gigantic one-eyed polar bear—very much like the stuffed toy owned by Danver’s dead son—and the sight of her own mother beckoning her to follow her to the ocean.
Danvers is also assisted by enthusiastic young officer Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) whose father Captain Hank Prior (John Hawkes) is a captain also working in the department. Hank does not like Danvers and takes advantage of every opportunity to undercut her while Peter and her have an interesting bond.
Despite their differences, Navarro and Danvers decide to work together to solve the murders of the researchers and Annie—whose deaths they believe are connected. After they discover a romantic link between Annie and one of the researchers, the trail takes them headlong into a violent intersection between Native and corporate cultures. Along the way, both are besieged by visions of their past and specters that seem to inhabit the darkness. Danvers falls through the ice after seeing a vision of her dead son beckoning her. Navarro follows her dead mother toward the sea and certain death. As in the first season of True Detective, the supernatural plays a huge role in the psychological interplay between Navarro and Danvers.
One of the main characters in this narrative is the darkness itself. As it descends over Ennis, the darkness seems to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the town’s collective psyche. Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) a single woman who lives on the edge of town, sees a vision of her dead husband outside her window. She follows him onto a frozen lake where he leads her to the frozen researchers. When she reports the find to Danvers, Rose treats her dead husband’s appearance as nothing extraordinary—just a part of the eternal night.
While the original series was created by Nic Pizzolatto, he was not involved in the writing or direction of this installment. This version was written and directed by Issa Lopez, while Pizzolatto was credited as executive producer. While the mystery story is cohesive, plausible, gripping, and logically impeccable, elements of the supernatural gnaw around the edges of the story—and the minds of the inhabitants. In both season one and four of this series, these eerie intrusions serve a vital narrative purpose, opening doors into the psychological makeups of both Cohle and Hart as well as Danvers and Navarro. Guilt, regret, rage, and betrayal are heralded by—and cojoined with—these supernatural visions. Although the audience is only given a cursory idea of what happened to Danvers’ little boy,
When the trail leads Danvers and Navarro into a series of ice caves near the research station, the visual metaphor of them slowly making their way through the dark and frozen recesses of the underground ice is beautifully emblematic of their own convoluted and torturous journey to justice and redemption.
There is also a strong thematic element of the strength of women, both in the Native community and in the police department itself. In one flashback, Navarro goes to Annie’s house to arrest her but finds her and a group of other Native women attending to a childbirth. Navarro holds back and even assists in the birth before taking Annie in.
Because of a recent of epidemic of childbirth deaths, the woman, spearheaded by Annie’s efforts, have become a driving force protesting t the local silver mine’s contamination of their water.
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are both simply brilliant as the two detectives. Foster adopts a crusty and brusque—even rude—exterior that masks her guilt and pain. Her strict and even draconian discipline of Leah is an overreaction—she already feels responsible for the death of one child—but in Foster’s hands, these deeply hidden motives still shine through. As Navarro, Reis carries her monumental emotional burdens under a mask of coolness and control. When she does blow, as when apprehending a serial domestic abuser, her anger doesn’t spill out as much as it explodes.
True Detective: Night Country is the best of both worlds. It’s a great detective story and a wonderfully spooky ghost story all rolled into one. It is compelling, gripping, and—at its conclusion—deeply, deeply satisfying.
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