Jodie Foster hunts a serial killer in True Detective season 4’s chilling trailer
Dubbed Night Country, the fourth season of True Detectives features Jodie Foster chasing a criminal in the wild (once again)
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HBO—whose streaming service is soon dropping the “HBO” and sticking to Max for some reason—is gearing up for another season of its fan-favorite crime anthology. True Detective returns for a fourth round with a star-studded lineup and a different but probably super gritty case, in typical TD style.
Created by Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective debuted almost a decade ago in 2014 with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing Louisiana homicide detectives. It was met with rave reviews, but season two? Not so much. The Penguin’s Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, and Rachel McAdams led the sophomore run of this anthology series. The third season was led by Mahershala Ali and premiered in 2019. Now almost four years later, the show returns under the leadership of showrunner, writer, and executive producer, Issa López.
Fellow Silence Of The Lamb fans, maybe this season was tailor-made for us. True Detective season four, titled Night Country, features Jodie Foster playing a cop chasing a dangerous killer. Foster plays Detective Liz Danvers, who is stationed in Ennis, Alaska when eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace as a long winter night begins. Danvers teams up with a fellow officer, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), to confront the darkness of their town and the one they carry in themselves to find the culprit.
As seen in the trailer, Detective Danners isn’t exactly a beloved figure in Ennis because she’s aloof and strict. Her own partner coldly tells her, “No one can stand you.” Much like the previous seasons, True Detective is as much about the officers’ complex relationship as it is about the mystery: What scared the eight missing men enough that they’d abandon their shoes and run into the frigid weather? The footage also makes it clear that we’re not getting too many brightly lit scenes in True Detective.
[A quick PSA: If you’re looking for another solid thriller set in Alaska that’s captivating and timely, we recommend checking out ABC’s Alaska Daily.]
True Detective: Night Country co-stars Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, Isabella Star Lablanc, Aka Niviâna, Anna Lambe, Joel D. Montgrand, Christopher Eccleston, and John Hawkes. HBO hasn’t released a premiere date yet.
72 Comments
I am cautiously optimistic. Loved seasons 1 and 3, and unlike seemingly everyone else, still enjoyed season 2, especially the performances by McAdams, Farrell, and Kitsch. I like when Foster does darker material like this and The Brave One.
I think that season 3 got overlooked because so many people started dismissing the show after season 2 (which I regard as an interesting failure).
The one high point in S2 was the Conway Twitty impersonator singing “Some say Love” in the dream sequence!
Season 2 had some good stuff, and the performances were largely top notch, but the story was a big nothing to me and the characters were all pretty unappealing. Season 3 had a great performances again, and the story had more meat on it, but the characters were kind of boring. In fact, I’d find it hard to say anything about any of them even though it’s the one I watched most recently. Season 1 was the only one which nailed all 3.
S3’s story felt like it had even less meat on it as (from what little I recall) the story was pretty straightforward and all the twist and turns were red herrings. The story felt more like an excuse to ponder mortality and declining mental faculties, which, fine I guess, but seemed like a miss for a show that really needed to prove itself.That said, I’d rather S3 get the re-evaluation than S2, which was trying too hard to be Twin Peaks 2.0 (only to get totally lapped when The Return came out a few years later).
Season 3 was boring. Overhyped for sure.
Same….and I dig the atmosphere of the dark of Alaska. Something foreboding about it. I look forward to it especially if Foster stretches her legs like Harrelson & McConaughey did. (Christ, I still wanted more adventures out of the two of them after)
Frozen Ground is a surprisingly good movie that checks the “dark Alaska” box.
Agreed. True Detective Season One is absolutely up there with the best television of the last 20 years. I did a full re-binge a few months ago and it’s kind of astounding how good it is. It will never, ever be replicated, but this one does look interesting. I love that John Hawkes is in it – that guarantees some excellent creepiness.
No shit!? Aw man, Hawkes is awesome. He wholly owns every role he puts under his belt. Sol Starr in Deadwood. Dustin Powers in Eastbound and Down. Teardrop Dolly in Winter’s Bone….The man can chew the scenery with the best. Put him against/with Foster and I am VERY excited now….
I still have nightmares from him in Martha Marcy May Marlene.
“How scared do you have to be to run out on the ice without shoes?” sounds directly lifted from Wind River (pretty damned good flick, imo).
I’ve seen one thing from Issa Lopez, “Tigers Are Not Afraid”. It’s decent. That’s not the literal translation of the original title in Mexico, but that line appears in the movie SO MANY TIMES.
Jodie Foster hunting a serial killer? Who’s gonna believe that?
It’ll never work!
In this day and age, who would actually go to the trouble of printing off all those images and laying them on the floor in a circle, or mounting them to a corkboard? It’s one of those visual tropes that needs to go. Just use G-Drive!
It still looks cooler visually, buzz off
Google Murderwall.
Unless it opens a plot hole, who cares. I’m fine with cool but purposeless visuals in a visual medium.
“In this day and age, who would actually go to the trouble of printing off all those images and laying them on the floor in a circle, or mounting them to a corkboard?”Maybe a 60 year old sheriff that spent her whole career doing just that, and doesn’t want to change up right before she retires.
She’s only 3 days to retirement.
Too old for this shit.
Hah, I see you’re getting flack in the comments, but I had the same thought, like— “oh good, she’s doing the cinematic photo thing! How visual!” I hope it’s great TV, but the trailer gives major grab-bag-of-tropes-assembled-by-AI vibes. I mean, a grizzled, not-well-liked older detective partnered with a younger, less experienced officer—and there’s friction?! You say they don’t like the way she does things? Ha-cha-cha, we got a picture!This specific kind of frozen-mystical-murder-mystery-series is a staple of euro TV (my favorite was Fortitude for Stanley Tucci reasons), so I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen this ten times before. Here’s hoping there’s some new wrinkle (aliens).
Yeah my thing is, sure it’s a visual, it’s just a really lazy one. And the thing is they’re all immaculate images so you can tell they were just printed out. I do research, and yes I’ll still print off documents on occasion when I need to do markups, or may be somewhere where I don’t have an internet connection, and they get dogeared and worn. So at least have some wear and tear so it conveys how the character has lived with, and been obsessed by the case.
Basic AI functions compute: 48 Hrs + Zodiac + Fargo / 2 Womyn leads = Success! Success! Success!
This is exactly what I thought.
I for one was not giving him flack, just answering their question about who would still be doing that in this day and age.
Hopefully there’s a scene of a Gen-Z officer being asked to the print images and they go: “what’s a ‘printer’?”
Her spiral of photos seemed to match that painted red spiral on the plywood wall.So I would think the verdict may still be out before TROPE BUSTING
Police departments don’t digitize everything, or do they?
Why did they cast a Professional Boxer, (and not an actress?), as her partner?
I hope the semi mystic vibes are back. It was a great component of the first series, initially planned and abandoned for season 2 and gone from 3…
I do think that the mysticism is the USP of this show yeah. It hints at a world beneath ours, without ever veering in fantasy. It’s the kind of thing I love, and I think the reason I’ve always been so frustrated by this show’s inability to resonate with me in full, is because that particular aspect is so appealing to me.
I’m hoping for a full on Cthulhu cult from this season.
Is it vampires? They are known to infest that area as shown in the documentary 30 Days of Night
How do you not already know the answer to this question from your regular briefings with the Evil CIA?Oh, wait. That’s just the regular CIA, isn’t it?
Nah, aliens. As shown in the documentary The Thing.
The Thing was Antarctica, aliens tend to shy away from Alaska.
They just can’t resist any kind of frigid, polar outpost with a bunch of dudes to kill. It’s like alien catnip.
Tried to post a picture of Alpha Flight, didn’t work. Oh well.
Wendigo.
Ooh I hope so
The learned historian and scholar Stephen King taught me the Wendigo was up in Vermont.
I think they have giant ice skates to traverse The Great White North.
“people come to alaska to escape,” crime photos on corkboard, annoying a24 trailer music… yep I’m sensing a turd
Let the fan theories begin already! Didn’t that spiral pattern show up in season one? And didn’t Rust Cohle spend some time in Alaska when his father was dying?
Season two. Maybe Zoomers will rediscover this series someday and tell us all how awesome season 2 is. I liked it for it’s big swings. So hard boiled that it was an exercise in over-boiling. “You coulda been a scrape-job!” is the nexus of cringe, hardcore, and camp. It seemed re-written on the fly – like a lot of HBO when its shows (or talent) hit cultural-freak-out status and spin out of control. Still liked Vince Vaughn’s death march.
My only remaining memory of season 2 is that weird mid-season pivot to a generic “assembling a ragtag team of rejects” structure. For whatever reason at the time, it felt to me like they had been watching The Wire specifically, and it baffled me because if there’s two HBO cop shows that are mathematical opposites, it’s surely those two.
I agree True Detective and The Wire are very different, but I always saw Law & Order as the mathematical opposite of The Wire.
I would agree if we’re talking about the Law and Order revival, but the original run had a lot of The Wire’s “this dead body is just another day at the office” energy (which is part of why the crossovers with Homicide: Life on the Street worked so well.)But the revival, ugh, gag me with a spoon. I think they’ve decided that given our present-day reckoning with police violence, they can’t afford to present cops as anything but incredibly reverent towards murder victims.
I dunno, I think that there’s more in common between those two. There’s a Venn diagram between Dick Wolf and David Simon that has Tom Fontana in the middle, and even though all their shows have a different look and feel, they’re cut from the same cloth.
I guess that’s why I’d say it’s the mathematical opposite…one and negative one have a lot in common, but one is a negative and the other a positive.The Wire and Law and Order might appear very similar (my understanding is that David Simon deliberately stuck with a standard format when other shows were widescreen because he wanted it to feel like watching regular ass TV), but one is an indictment of the system and the other is a celebration/whitewashing of it.True Detective doesn’t really resemble either of those, except in that it shares Law and Order’s mythologizing of cops and The Wire’s acknowledgement of widespread corruption in those systems.
S2 seems like something destined for an over-corrected reappraisal. I’ll grant that some were quick to dismiss it, but damned if it didn’t feel like the show took every Twin Peaks comparison to heart and ended up all the worse for it.
Season 2 is one that I binged the week after it finished while I was on a few days off and I thought it was totally fine. Not as good as Season 1 to be sure but even at the time I thought people were overly critical and prone to weirdly intense levels of hyperbole.
The boiled down pitches for each season still sound great:S1 “Two totally different cops who hate each others guts have to put their past aside and reunite to solve a serial killer cold case.” Great. The camera held a little too long on the landscaping guy and tipped the ending for me. But still, Top Tier Harrelson – and still possibly McConaughey’s best role.S2 Three Cops and a Criminal married couple have to solve a SoCal conspiracy. Memory holed a lot of this – forgot about the mid-season’s nutty shoot-out. Acting was great. Loved Vaughn as a heavy. Kelly Reilly steals the show!S3 “Lead Detective fights against his own growing Alzheimer’s to solve an old case.” I think Mahershala Ali got me to cry a couple times. Dorff was great. Good old-age makeup.S4 “A flinty cop in her 50’s pairs with a young partner in her 30’s to solve a … ?” Well, they haven’t done the Old Cop/Young Cop thing yet.
As much as I loved S1, I saw the S2 sophomore slump coming because if we’re being honest, the S1 was kind of weak (some critics did call this out). I think what they were trying to invoke with their noirish S2 was specifically a Chinatown vibe. That failed. Then they pivoted to what they did in S3 which was stronger but still not up to the lightning in a bottle they captured with S1.I guess we’ll see what S4 brings but for my money I think the missing element is that for almost the entirety of S1 there was a feeling of a supernatural element underpinning everything, something that turned out to just be run of the mill human depravity.
And since I’ve written all of this, what I think would have been interesting is if these anthologies had as a common thread a connection to some unseen supernatural lovecraftian entity unconnected followers were committing these acts in service of or for whatever rituals of power.
Yeah, S1 and S2 both had the Eyes Wide Shut cult of depraved rich people in the background. I don’t mind going back there.S4 looks like it has an X-Files vibe going too. S3 started out with what looked like a ritual killing too – then turned out to be… not.If in the end, after True Detective disappears – if ever, maybe it will be looked back upon as the Supernatural Cock-Tease Show. If they could actually lean into that: that people really really want to see supernatural things come true to the point of madness (what draws people to QAnon, basically — really the show should do a QAnon season) — they could own it and be like: “Yeah, funny. Everyone wants these mysteries to be supernatural. Sorry to disappoint… every fucking time. Get the hint, people?”All that said, S3’s big try with Ali’s detective going senile just out of reach of solving the case, was a nice near-tragic story – and pretty unique too.
I missed a word: “s1 ending was weak” is what that should have said, and that ties it to what we’re both speaking on, which is what you aptly termed “supernatural cock tease”. I think a good comparison for a similar show that delivered on the supernatural element throughout was the adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Outsider”. For my money, that almost went too far in the other direction, demonstrating some of the challenges inherent in trying to navigate a horror element in a very grounded world. But it was ultimately very satisfying and I would have loved a second season of that.
Agreed on S3 and Ali’s portrayal of that was powerful.
Dyatlov Pass?
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the trailer.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident.
HBO, whose streaming service is soon dropping the “HBO” and sticking to Max for some reasonBecause branding is so overrated. “Coming soon to your favorite restaurant, grocery store and vending machine: COLA (formerly known as Coca-Cola).”
I have found the writing in these shows exceedingly precious and self-important. It’s never allowed me to enjoy it in full, but I have admired formal aspects of the production: the direction achieves an impressively sustained apocalyptic mood but it all comes across as superficial without any quality writing underpinning it. It always struck me as a solid production in desperate search of a script. Here’s hoping a new showrunner will give it the depth of writing it needs.
Star studded? Aside from Foster, who are the ‘stars’?
My money is on the killer being a Bigfoot.
Look, all of us want a Devolution mini-series just as much as you do.
Excuse me, but “Bigfoot” is not the preferred nomenclature. This is snow we’re talking about, so it is clearly a Sasquatch killer.
Wendigo.
Darkness…No parents….!!!!!
Wendigo. Please let it be a wendigo….or Ithaqua. He’s like a super wendigo.
The spiral iconography is back, big time. Is this season going to finally connect back to series 1? I always regretted that the entire Carcosa/Yellow King thread wasn’t ever exhausted. Allusions to a larger network of worshipers was just tossed aside.
I’ve spent some time in northern AK and you really don’t see a ton of people with metal cheek piercings. But show looks decent.
I had to go pretty deep into the trailer, but it looks like they hired some Indigenous actors for this. Hopefully it’s a nuanced representation.Also, did anyone else find that cheek piercing on the detective unnecessarily distracting?