It’s always darkest before the dawn — unless you’re a character in HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country,” set in an Alaskan town where there’s no dawn for weeks each year. It’s all dark, darker, and darkest, day in and day out, just like the crimes, the eerie mysteries, and the gobs of existential dread that fuel this excellent fourth season of the anthology series. Those bright spots you see every so often are only from the cold white snow, there to blanket dead bodies and crashed cars, and from the flashlights of those out looking for them.
“True Detective” has had an uneven run since its 2014 premiere, with the memorable first season, featuring Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, and some abstract bloviation, followed by two less compelling rounds. “True Detective: Night Country,” which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m., is a return to form, but with a fresh new energy as original creator Nic Pizzolatto has been replaced by Mexican writer-director Issa Lopez. The season has a forward drive that grabs you and pulls you through all kinds of heavy twists, ominous clues bordering on the supernatural, and bleak horizons, to the point where I ended up wanting more than the season’s six episodes — something I don’t often feel in these days of bloated lengths. Rather than letting the rampant nighttime enervate the action, Lopez uses it as a kind of monster that’s giving chase.
True to the series blueprint, there are two incompatible and somewhat tortured detectives working on an expansive case. Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) were teamed up in the past, but it ended unhappily after a gnarly domestic violence case that still troubles Navarro. Now they’re working together again on a dazzlingly strange crime that begins when a group of eight male scientists living on an Arctic research base disappear, leaving their building with the lights and the TV on. Are they dead somewhere out there? On “Night Country,” the relentless darkness sometimes seems like a porous wall, with the afterlife on the other side.
Oh, and what’s that on the floor of the research base? Yup, it’s a detached tongue — the tongue of an Indigenous woman murdered years earlier after protesting against the local mining company and its carelessness. What is the connection between the new case and the cold case? Soon, an eccentric local, played by Fiona Shaw, is led by what appears to be a ghost to the site of a jaw-dropping . . . OK, I’ll stop there. It’s worth being unprepared as the story lines unfold, sometimes with the stark terror of a horror movie, other times at a more gnawing and gradual pace.
Foster is remarkable here, in ways that remind me of Kate Winslet’s turn in “Mare of Easttown.” It’s one of her most natural and charismatic performances. You never feel her acting as her Danvers obsesses over the case, bosses her co-workers around, and, cynically, lets the rest of her life drift. She’s analytical, and procedural, not emotional. Danvers has a justified reputation for fooling around with married men, but it’s all just bluster to her, something to do while she’s running away from her past. The town is small, and she is not beloved by the mostly Indigenous population, of which her teen stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella LeBlanc), is a member — but then Danvers is unfazed by unpopularity.
Reis is a great partner for Foster, and a revelation as an actor. Navarro is a state trooper who’s been toughened by a hard life, but who remains compassionate, caring for her mentally ill sister. She is younger than Danvers but more expansive spiritually. At one point, Danvers mocks Navarro because she admits to praying. “You talk to God,” she says snidely. “No, I listen,” Navarro responds. Navarro is the soul of the show this season, and Reis conveys that movingly but without sentimentality. At a certain point, you can see Navarro give in to Danvers despite their thorny past and despite Danvers’s abrasiveness; underneath it all, they’re both shrewd detectives who want justice.
The hints of the supernatural this season are powerful, with the dead always seeming to be waiting to pounce on the living world. But everything is grounded in hard reality, in the mistreatment of Indigenous people, in the degradation of the environment, and in the family bonds that never heal. Certainly this chilly, dark season of “True Detective” may leave you with a case of SAD — but you will nonetheless be happy you saw it.
TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY
Starring: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, John Hawkes
On: HBO, Max. Premieres Sunday, 9 p.m.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.