What caused the death of the frozen men is one of the central cases of “Night Country,” the other being the brutal murder years before of a young indigenous woman. The two police officers investigating the two cases, whose connection gradually becomes clear, hate each other, not in a fun or joking way, but with great sincerity.
Jodie Foster plays Danvers, the abrasive police chief of the remote Alaska mining town where the story takes place, and Kali Reis plays Navarro, a tenacious state trooper. Both characters carry paralyzing baggage: family deaths; loved ones with problems; terror in times of war; the disadvantages of being a woman and, in the case of Navarro, indigenous. On top of it all, they share a dark moment in their professional past, a secret that, like many things in the season, is frequently teased before being revealed in anticlimactic fashion.
And they are not alone in their dysfunction: Almost everyone in “Night Country” is beaten or broken, angry or bitter. The exceptions are the fools: the preternaturally kind waiter, Qavvik (Joel D. Montgrand), whom Navarro uses for sex, and the puppy helper, Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), whom Danvers sees as a surrogate son and works excessively without mercy. Both border on caricature (men who are exceptional for being basically decent), but Montgrand and Bennett make them believable and sympathetic. John Hawkes can't do the same for Prior's father, Hank, a casually corrupt cop who is anxiously awaiting his online fiancée to arrive from Vladivostok; It's an absolute caricature.
Arctic settings (the season was filmed in Iceland), shot with an emphasis on darkness and vast, empty landscapes, go hand in hand with eerie horror motifs; Close comparisons include John Carpenter's “The Thing” and the British series “Fortitude,” a show that covers some of the same subject matter as “Night Country,” but in a funnier, less grueling way. López, with the help of cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, unfolds those elements into an atmospheric yet intricate mystery that looks and feels, for a couple of episodes, as if it could reach an interesting conclusion. But he can't keep it under control: the mystery constantly dissolves into absurdity, the characters sink into incoherence, and the horror isn't original or evocative enough to hold things up on their own.
The only way the season can be said to have succeeded, if only on the strength of its convictions, is as a representation of cultural and economic predation: the environmental damage caused by the mine is a factor in the mystery, and the resolution of the story is better. explained by problems and emotions than by evidence or character development.
