“Haven't you ever had this feeling that sometimes you just want to disappear? Get out and that's it. "Don't look back," says a police officer behind the wheel in the middle of the night. It is the first sentence of a trailer that, if combined with the symbols that appeared during the investigation, draw a clear line: this is True Detective. It's time for existential homicide detectives, crimes with ulterior motives and, in the case of the fourth season titled True Detective: Polar Night, also a female focus for the first time.
A peculiarity of this fictional universe is that Nic Pizzolatto, its creator, until now had only collaborated with men. He wrote the first season alone and collaborated only with director Cary Fukunaga, with whom he ended up falling out; in the second, where he had Scott Lasser as a scriptwriter, he worked with directors such as Justin Lin from Fast and Furious or Jeremy Podeswa and Miguel Sapochnik from Game of Thrones; and in the third, where he wrote accompanied by David Milch and Graham Nordy, he himself acted as director like Daniel Sackheim or Jeremy Saulnier. It was basically a men's club.
At HBO, however, they thought it was a good idea to rescue the True Detective brand, so prestigious in its first season, and emancipate it from its own creator, Pizzolatto, to leave the reins to a voice with a different profile. The person in charge is the Mexican Issa López (Vuelven), who writes and directs all the episodes and will be able to play with the characteristic elements of this fictional universe: the profile of the crimes, the dynamics between the detectives, the creation of a murky atmosphere and a slow pace, the existentialism that permeates the characters.
For this new approach, López has Jodie Foster, who had not had a permanent or recurring role on television since the seventies, although as a director she has worked on titles of this millennium such as House of Cards, Orange is the new black, Tales of the loop or Black Mirror. The winner of two Oscars is accompanied by Kali Reis, known above all for her career as a boxer. The cast is completed by Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve), Christopher Eccleston (The Leftovers) and John Hawkes (The Sessions).
And what will this True Detective: Polar Night be about? “As the long winter night falls on Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station disappear without a trace. To solve the case, detectives Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Reis) will have to confront the darkness within themselves and dig into the tormented truths that lie buried beneath the eternal ice.”
Starting January 15, it can be seen on HBO Max and, surprisingly for those who did not have the previous agreement with True Detective in mind, also Movistar Plus.
