“ True Detective: Night Country ” is true to its name in that it makes the night — specifically 30 days of polar night in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska — feel like a monster waiting to swallow you up. Or, as cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister puts it, “If you switch off the lights in Alaska, you’ll die.” Achieving a dark look for HBO’s mystery series of murder, and maybe something a little bit more supernatural, counterintuitively meant focusing on the elements of light.
There’s precious little knowledge to be illuminated when Ennis police chief Liz Danvers ( Jodi Foster ) and her former partner, Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), begin looking into a tangle of bodies found frozen near the Tsalal Research Station. But there are a lot of choices that people who live that far north make to feel a little more human, from how they light their homes to how they dress to how they navigate the environment. The “ True Detective: Night Country ” team captures all of them and, through portraying the series’ lived-in sense of place, gives us a sense of what might be so wrong that it inevitably leads to death.
Like any good mystery, the atmosphere gives us a thrill and the ability to catch the clues. “It’s a very conscious decision what kind of an atmosphere you want to create. Obviously, we wanted to create an atmosphere of danger at times, mystery, and those two parts that fall into with the supernatural,” Hoffmeister told In.