Roush Review: ‘True Detective’ Makes a Truly Chilling Return
Review
True Detective
Afraid of the dark? You might think twice before delving into the riveting new season of HBO‘s True Detective anthology franchise, appropriately subtitled Night Country to describe the eerie setting: a remote Alaskan town plunged into months of perpetual darkness. Against this bleak backdrop, a ghastly mystery occupies the attention of prickly police chief Liz Danvers (a wonderfully abrasive Jodie Foster), who’s reunited with her equally uncompromising former partner, now a state trooper, Evangeline “Angie” Navarro (former pro boxer Kali Reis).
With a nod of inspiration to John Carpenter‘s terrifying 1981 remake of The Thing, new showrunner Issa López stages a grisly tableau of inexplicable death outside a research station where a group of international scientists have vanished, later discovered frozen in a heap of twisted, naked bodies. Soon, a connection is made to the murder of a young Indigenous female activist, a cold case Navarro refuses to let die (ergo her reluctant partnership with Danvers). And you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the root causes of the mystery to lie with the deep-pocketed mining company that dominates “end of the world” Ennis, Alaska, whose longtime natives accuse the mine of poisoning the community, where stillbirths are a tragic commonplace.
In True Detective tradition, the whodunit aspect takes a backseat to a pervasive existential dread, with mystical symbols and spooky visions adding a supernatural undercurrent to the investigation. Among the haunted is Rose (the perpetually scene-stealing Fiona Shaw), a former professor who’s always good for a creepy philosophical one-liner: “The world is getting old, and Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams,” she declares, sounding like a character from a classic horror movie.
Turns out she’s not that far off the mark. Danvers and Navarro are each haunted by tragedies and ghosts — sometimes literal – from their past, with Navarro especially concerned about the state of her mentally unstable sister (Aka Niviana). Madness being something of an ongoing side effect of living for months without the sun.
In one of her strongest roles since playing Clarice Starling to Oscar glory in The Silence of the Lambs, Foster bristles with anger and arrogance, giving Danvers a surprising (and amusing) sexual drive that has turned half the town against her. Reis is every bit her equal in commanding the screen. Together, they’re the strongest Detective duo since Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season.
Danvers has few boundaries, hounding and humiliating her resentful deputy Hank (John Hawkes, brimming with hangdog pathos) while mentoring his earnest son Peter (an appealing Finn Bennett) in such a cloying manner that Hank’s “Mrs. Robinson” wisecrack (which young Peter doesn’t get) may not really be out of line. (She has an even more contentious relationship with her boss from Anchorage, a sheepishly game Christopher Eccleston). Always pushing Peter and Navarro to ask the right questions, Danvers ultimately drives herself to the brink, realizing that “Some questions just don’t have answers.”
This isn’t something you always want to hear in a murder mystery, but it comes with the territory in True Detective, which subverts the genre in ways that chill the soul while stimulating the senses.
True Detective: Night Country, Season Premiere, Sunday, January 14, 9/8c, HBO
