Karl Puschmann: True Detective returns with Jodie Foster, ghosts and severed tongues

Jodie Foster (right) stars in the latest season of True Detective. Photo / HBO

OPINION

It was the severed human tongue lying on the floor that sold me. Up until that moment, the new season of True Detective had intrigued. It had a creepy tone, a mysterious, potentially supernatural, mass murder and a blizzard of unexplainable phenomena swirling around in the freezing Alaskan air.

But it was the severed tongue that sealed the deal. Especially as the detectives quickly surmised that the tongue could only belong to someone who could not have been where their tongue currently was.

There was also a ghost.

It’s fair to say that a decade on from its debut, True Detective is finally back on form with its new season, which begins streaming on Neon from Monday. It’s a show with a rocky history. There was its brilliant, game-changing first season in 2014, a massively disappointing follow-up in 2015 and a well-received but largely ignored third outing in 2019.

The first season was supremely eerie and genuinely gripping, with a peculiar blend of mystery and cosmic horror. But after that breakthrough season, the show began leaning away from those occultist elements and icky strangeness and turning down the weirdness.

So it’s incredibly pleasing that True Detective: Night Country is going all in on the spookiness. Set in a small, snow-covered, Alaskan town right as the sun sets for 60 nights, this season follows police chief Liz Danvers as she sets about investigating the sudden disappearance of eight scientists from an Arctic research base.

This set-up immediately reminds of John Carpenter’s seminal horror flick The Thing. Only here the whole science team goes at once, rather than being picked off one by one. But the base is filled with a menacing threat that, for now anyway, remains unexplainable.

As does the aforementioned severed tongue, which Danvers finds in the base’s rec room along with a hastily abandoned moulding ham sandwich and a scene from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off looping endlessly and loudly on the telly.

Despite the rec room’s bright fluorescent lights, the scene is tense and the mood grim. Which also acts as a decent summary of the first episode. As Danvers begins investigating she comes to believe the tongue relates to an old unsolved murder case, which saw a native American woman brutally murdered and mutilated in the remote town.

True Detective is back on screens with season 4. Photo / HBO

But how this ties into the disappearance of the scientists remains to be seen. As does the supernatural phenomena that cause a herd of deer to completely freak out and leap to their deaths and a barefoot spirit that guides a townswoman to a gruesome discovery.

True Detective has always attracted A-List talent and TD: Night Country boasts Jodie Foster in the lead role of Danvers. She is, as expected, effortlessly fantastic as the determined police chief who’s as adept at grinding people’s gears as she is at her job. Although, it’s not as revelatory a performance - or character for that matter - as Matthew McConaughey’s enigmatic, boozy philosopher, Detective Rust Cohle, from way back in the show’s first season.

Location is as much a character in True Detective as its actors and that’s equally true here. The isolated all-encompassing dark is naturally unsettling and its constant snow is a reminder of how inhospitable a place it is. Terror could be anywhere and even if it’s not that feeling it might be persists.

And that uneasy vibe is what True Detective: Night Country gets across so well. Not since the show’s triumphant first season has its ideals of mystery and horror blended so well. It feels like prestige television and I hope its short running time - a mere six episodes - is enough to do justice to the haunting promise of its opening episode.

True Detective is truly back and it’s a chilling watch.