True Detective: Night Country Has 'A Direct Line' To Silence Of The Lambs

It's been four years since we dipped into the moral morass of "True Detective," and this season promises to be, literally, the darkest yet.

Set in the fictional small town of Ennis, Alaska, the show's fourth season, subtitled "Night Country," is going to use the region's punishingly long nights to evoke a deep sense of dread — and it's going to do so without extensive story input from series creator Nic Pizzolatto. Though he will receive an executive producer credit, this season belongs to writer-director Issa López, who made a startlingly creepy impression in 2017 with her clever crime-horror flick "Tigers Are Not Afraid."

López is a particularly inspired choice because she values the importance of atmosphere in conveying a pervasive feeling of foreboding that sticks to you long after the film or episode is over. She also understands what made the first and best season of "True Detective" so effective; it played like a grimy James Ellroy cop saga tinged with a hint of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. At any given moment, you believed that this corroded procedural could go full-blown supernatural. It was an exhilarating experience, and it shockingly stuck the landing on a note of hope.

In trading the sweltering humidity of Louisiana for the bone-aching cold of Alaska, López has also flip-sided the first season by casting two female leads. Kali Reis, the former pro boxing champion turned actor (and Indie Spirit Award Best Actress nominee for 2017's "Catch the Fair One"), should thrive as a hardboiled detective, but the undeniable hook here is Jodie Foster donning a law enforcement badge for the first time since Jonathan Demme's "Silence of the Lambs." The urge to compare her FBI trainee in the 1991 classic (which earned Foster her second Best Actress Oscar) to her detective in this season of "True Detective" is understandable. Are there echoes of Clarice Starling in Liz Danvers? Depends on who you ask.

In the latest issue of Total Film, Foster and López address the elephant in the room, and voice somewhat conflicting feelings about the connective tissue between Starling and Danvers. "Clarice is all about the ethics," said Foster. "And she's quiet and reserved and always doing the right thing, and that is not Danvers. I kind of hope Clarice never got this cynical."

The case Danvers is investigating involves the bizarrely sudden disappearance of eight scientists from an arctic research station. It's spooky stuff that brings back the cosmic terror of the first season. According to López:

"There's popcorn made in front of a movie that they're watching. And there's the notebooks that were left mid-sentences, sandwiches that were ready to be eaten. There's a treadmill still running. And they just vanish into thin air. Nobody understands what happens."

While Foster doesn't see much of Starling in Danvers, López views her season of "True Detective" as a natural progression from "Silence of the Lambs." Sight unseen, it at least makes solid thematic sense.

As López told Total Film:

"[Starling's] just one of these characters. All the lines of that movie just live in my skull. We know the lines, we know the moments, we know the images. And there's a direct line, I think ... 'The Silence of the Lambs' mothered [David Fincher's serial-killer chiller] 'Se7en,' and 'Se7en' mothered 'True Detective.' And this is the child of 'True Detective.' So there's a direct line. That's why I went directly to the source. And we're not shying away from it."

At this point in her career, I'm thrilled by the prospect of watching Foster sink her teeth into a messed-up protagonist over six episodes. This will be Foster's first on-screen acting for television since her appearance in the 1975 television movie "The Secret Life of T.K. Dearing," and, based on screen time alone, could very well be the deepest she's ever immersed herself in a character. Per López, "You're going to see a Jodie Foster you haven't seen because she always plays very successful, very powerful ... I think it's going to be a massive surprise."

Here's how Foster described Danvers to Total Film:

"She's self-involved and distracted at the same time. I think she's very dismissive of emotions, emotional people, and doesn't really understand how the world has changed. And she's also blunt and tells it like it is, which I always like. She's a good cop. She has her dirty-cop side, and that's a good thing and a bad thing in this show."

For Danvers, it sounds like the lambs have been screaming for so long that she can't hear anything else but misery. How this factors into her investigation of an inexplicable case should make for insanely compelling television.

"True Detective: Night Country" premieres January 14, 2024 on Max.