Jodie Foster Spirals Into The Icy Heart Of Darkness In The True Detective Season 4 Trailer

Trust no one! "True Detective: Night Country" is just around the corner. The fourth season in HBO's anthology series, created and executive-produced by Nic Pizzolatto, is coming to the small screen in January, and there are plenty of reasons to be excited. I could spend this entire piece focusing only on one: the star casting of Jodie Foster. Foster is an absolute legend, a versatile powder keg of performance power who has taken some wild career swings as of late — directing episodes of "Black Mirror" and "Tales From the Loop," executive producing and appearing in a documentary about pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, and leading the ensemble of the incisively political 2021 film "The Mauritanian." 

In "True Detective," as we know from the previous trailer, Foster will play Detective Liz Danvers, who, alongside partner Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), is investigating a particularly gruesome and bizarre crime. Per that trailer: "We've got five bodies frozen into a giant block of flesh, and no answers." In the new trailer released today, we also see the return of the spiral motif, which featured heavily in the Yellow King cult of season 1 and was briefly mentioned in season 3. 

Will season 4 begin to build the grand bridge spanning the breadth of "True Detective" lore? Now's the time to take up your magnifying glasses and start scanning each frame of the new trailer for clues.

"True Detective: Night Country" is the series' first season after Pizzolatto stepped back as writer and director. Taking his place is the capable Issa López, who first burst onto the international kino scene with the 2017 magical-realist-crime-fantasy-horror film "Tigers Are Not Afraid." Those who saw that film will know the knack she has for subverting expectations and manipulating genre conventions, so there's reason to hope "Night Country" will be a step up from the disappointing third season. It seems clear that Pizzolatto meant to do his own kind of subversion there, to skewer the libidinal vortex viewers anticipate whenever they engage with a piece of art or media focused on crime, while politely maintaining that of course it's only with compassion and righteous indignation that they consume the such stories of brutalization and injustice. How deliberately flat, uneventful, and ultimately nihilistic that series was I at least interpret as a rebuke to the whole project of true crime.

Well, none of the crimes on "True Detective" have ever been "true" in the literal sense, funnily enough. And as heartily as I agree with Pizzolatto that true crime bloodlust is deeply pathological and unsettling, there were better ways of exploring it. One such alternative is to do what Lopez seems to have done, which is fold the series lore back on itself. Perhaps "Night Country" will be an inquest into the very ethics of the series itself? 

"True Detective" season 4 premieres on HBO and Max on January 14, 2024.