True Detective: Night Country is a six-episode mystery series written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Issa López.
Jodie Foster plays police chief Elizabeth Danvers, who’s affected by a personal tragedy that she’s not fully recovered from and it has made her rather cynical. She hesitatingly partners with detective Evangeline Navarro, played by actor and boxer Kali Ries, to find the truth of what happened when eight men vanish from an Arctic research station. At the research station, scientists (one played by Icelandic actor Þorsteinn Bachmann) have been investigating arctic biology and geology as well as the impacts of climate change.
“I think that’s why the show is so beautifully written, because of all the relevant topics and also the deep anxiety that we’re living in today vis-à-vis nature: the human relationship with nature and what we’ve done, and how we’ve served and not served it. I think those are important things and all of that anxiety is what makes horror film, right? Horror films are made from anxiety, as is science fiction.”
When six of the men’s naked bodies are found frozen into a huge mass, the detectives try to figure out how this crime might connect to the case of a murdered Native woman that’s been haunting the town of Ennis and the detectives for years. The two detectives are also forced to confront the darkness they carry within themselves, and the dark, raw location reflects the psychological state of the characters.
“I feel that the place, and that eerie messed-up horror quality of the place, mirrors the internal psyche of the detectives,” says Jodie about the dark, cold setting. “It’s so much about grief and how the dead walk among us, and the toll on nature that human activity has taken on it, and the idea that that nature could rise up and wake up and fight back in some ways. I thought that was just beautiful.”
