True Detective: Night Country streaming on MAX. Podcast for paid subscribers only.
Night Country is sold as a whodunnit, but it's really a ghost story about environmental racism and how women relate to one another. The show is under the True Detective umbrella, though it has no involvement with its original creator Nic Pizzolatto. As with the other seasons of the anthology show, Night Country drew immediate comparisons to 2014’s first season, one of the most loved and hyped runs of the last wave of prestige TV. It had been a few years, so I rewatched season one in unison with Night Country. There’s interesting overlap but the True Detective brand hurt Night Country by inviting unfair comparisons and blatant misogyny. Director Issa López has had to spend too much time defending the show against negative comments made by Pizzolatto and his fans. Night Country attempts to tie itself to the original via Easter eggs, but the show feels more like an inversion of season one instead of an homage (it shares more DNA with the Mare of Easttown). It replaces the creepy Louisiana daylight with an endless Alaskan night, the dangers of the frozen ocean are never far away. Its biggest call-and-response is in its exploration of gender. S1 of True Detective was a study on the different versions of masculinity, both toxic and noble and how loss and ego paints these. Night Country is about how women deal with the same circumstances. While S1 only hinted at the supernatural, Night Country weaves magical realism into the central mystery, such as the apparitions of dead folks which are common in town.
The show is far from perfect. There’s some dialogue clunkers and distracting needle drops (the opening’s overused Billie Eilish or that corny Twist and Shout remake). But Jodie Foster and brilliant newcomer Kali Reis have a hard chemistry and the show plays against form in ways which make it unpredictable. Foster’s character muddies up her life by sleeping with everyone in town in her own rendition of a femme fatale and her fraught relationship with her lesbian daughter’s political awakening are effective subplots. The Goyaesque “corpsicle” of the first half lends the kind of creepiness that it tries to achieve with the outdated jump scares toward the end. Kudos to the makeup department and sound design which do heavy lifting. Night Country also heals some of the cultural insensitivity of the first season, which depended on Southern gothic stereotypes like killer incestuous rednecks and tragic prostitutes. The finale left me mostly satisfied for solving the mystery, but it felt a little rushed and on-the-nose. Night Country could be too slow and may be one of those rare HBO shows that benefits from binging instead of a weekly watch.
In a breathless flashback, the victim of our murder mystery, an Iñupiaq midwife and activist, is assisting a birth among a group of indigenous women. It’s an intimate scene that feels more like a ceremony than a medical procedure. As the tradition of indigenous midwifery continues to disappear in these regions, the birth is also a political act. Pollution from the town’s mine has been causing stillbirths so we’re forced to wait and see if the child will survive. It cuts to the present, where a gang of men holding giant rifles head into the frozen ocean to hunt another man. It’s beautiful and grueling, the kind of scene where Night Country hits its main theme: women are always left with the responsibility to defend life and honor the dead, even in the most uninhabitable places.
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