The first crime scene in the new season of “True Detective” isn’t that of the seven gnarled, naked bodies we see piled on top of one another in the snow at the end of Episode 1, but of a more mundane violence. A woman tries to flee her physically abusive boyfriend, and he tracks her down at work. This time, he gets walloped, with a metal bucket, by his girlfriend’s co-worker, an older woman. The blow leaves his face a gory mess. The officer who arrives to escort the man off the premises, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), asks the girlfriend whether she’ll press charges against her ex; the trooper doesn’t offer him the same choice before putting him in cuffs. The local chief of police, Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), isn’t exactly complimentary when she later says that Navarro’s “got this thing about women who get hurt.” The arrest feels righteous, but the stench of the man’s menace lingers. Tidy endings are hard to come by, especially once blood has been spilled.
There’s a refusal to separate or elevate sensational brutality from the everyday sort in this latest installment of the HBO anthology drama—a feminist revision of a series best known for its macho poetry and its ogling eye. The show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, had his mostly male investigators contend with child murderers and pedophile rings; the QAnon-esque luridness of those crimes haunted the grizzled detectives for decades thereafter. The writer-director Issa López, who has taken over from Pizzolatto as showrunner, moves the action from sunbaked states to the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, where, as of mid-December, daylight won’t return for several weeks. The uninterrupted Arctic dark lends the season its subtitle, “Night Country,” as well as its wintry, edge-of-civilization atmospherics. Watching the six-part season from under a blanket in California, I couldn’t get warm.
この記事は The New Yorker の January 22, 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の January 22, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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