Issa López puts ghosts into crime stories and wants them in the same scene as the police procedure. In Night Country she nearly holds that for six episodes, and Jodie Foster is as good as she has been in years.
Fi1m perspective
The sun has set for the winter in Night Country (2024) and it does not come back. Florian Hoffmeister lights the Alaskan town by sodium lamp and snow, Jodie Foster's Liz Danvers runs the police, and Kali Reis's Evangeline Navarro will not let an old case rest. Somewhere in the same shot there is usually something that should not be there. That is the López habit: a procedural at the front of the frame, a haunting at the back, and no cut between them to tell you which one you are watching. She also likes her investigators to be women and her corpses to be men, and she does not make a speech about it.
She did not begin in the dark. López started in Mexico ghostwriting telenovelas, then wrote and directed studio comedies, Efectos secundarios (2006) and Casi divas (2008), the second with a score by Hans Zimmer. They did well and she has not gone back to them. A Hollywood project fell through, and what came out the other side was Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017), a horror film that mixes fairy tale with cartel violence. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is the film people mean when they say her name, and that its subjects are the ones she has kept: grief, sudden death, and the missing who will not leave until somebody finds out what happened to them.
What works in Night Country is the control. López created, wrote and directed all of it herself, and it shows: the town is one place, cold in the same way in every episode, and Fiona Shaw and John Hawkes fill it out with people who belong there. Foster is as good as she has been in years. What does not quite work is the thing López most wants. She asks the ghosts and the police procedure to occupy the same scene, and for six episodes she nearly manages it. Nearly is the honest word. We were unsure about the ghosts, and we still are, because an apparition tells you the dead are angry while the procedure tells you why, and when both speak at once it is the case that gets drowned out.
She has said she grew up with "a truly not healthy obsession with Sherlock Holmes", and you can see it in how she lays a case out. What she adds is the conviction that some of the pieces are not of this world, and that naming a culprit does not tidy up a grief. A fifth season of True Detective is planned with López in charge again. We would like it colder still, and with one ghost fewer.
Biography
Issa López is a Mexican film and television writer, director and producer. Born in Mexico City in 1971, she trained in film directing and screenwriting at the National University of Mexico before working on telenovelas and other television projects.
She has written numerous Spanish-language feature films and directed four of them, including Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017), which premiered at Fantastic Fest and won awards including two Ariel Awards. In 2024 López created, wrote and directed all episodes of True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the HBO series, for which she received three Primetime Emmy nominations.
