What to Watch After 'True Detective: Night Country'
Did the show end too early? Watch these movies next.
For those of us who enjoyed the weekly appointment viewing of True Detective: Night Country, six episodes were not enough. As seasons of television seem to get shorter and shorter, the audience's desire for more only grows. It's simple supply and demand.
Well, I'm here with some more supply. If six episodes felt incomplete, here are five movies with similar stories and themes to keep you watching.
Insomnia (2002)
Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn’t set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.
This is maybe the most obvious inclusion on this list, so it gets the first spot. One of Christopher Nolan's earliest films, Insomnia tells the story of a pair of detectives investigating an unsolved murder during Alaska's period of uninterrupted sunlight. Sound familiar? It's a very similar concept to Night Country's period of ...night...country...just in reverse.
This is when Al Pacino was in his goofy era and Robin Williams was trying out the creepy thing (One Hour Photo came out the same year) and it's worth a watch for the performances alone.
Clearcut (1991)
A white lawyer finds his values shaken when he is paired with an angry Indigenous activist who insists on kidnapping the head of a logging company to teach him the price of his destruction.
If you enjoyed the finale's explanation of what happened to the Tsalal scientists, you'll latch onto the story told in Clearcut. When a First Nations man gets fed up with the logging of Indigenous land and the constant mistreatment of his people, he decides to take matters (or revenge) into his own hands. It doesn't take long for the white men (either those doing it or those not doing anything to stop it), to...well...get the message.
If the gross-out elements of Night Country were about as much as you could handle, Clearcut might be too much as it's a straight-up horror movie. But it's more than worth it if you can push through - lead actor Graham Greene, known for playing Native characters in movies like Dances with Wolves and Grey Owl (if this gives you an indication of the career he's had), called this his favorite movie of his career. I think that says a lot.
Thunderheart (1992)
An FBI man with Sioux background is sent to a reservation to help with a murder investigation, where he has to come to terms with his heritage.
Graham Greene returns the following year, this time pairing with Val Kilmer for a mystery revolving around a murder on a Native reservation. Kilmer plays a half-Sioux man (Kilmer claims his paternal grandmother was Cherokee) who has to come to terms with his ancestry while trying to solve this murder. It's almost a one-for-one comparison to Jodie Foster's character in Night Country, as both characters find the ways of the local people to be antiquated, until they become more important than they could ever imagine.
"I flew in here from a place called the 20th century," Kilmer's character barks at Greene's. "I don't need to listen to the trees or talk to the sand to get answers." Doesn't that sound like it could have been a Foster line if you swapped the centuries in which their stories took place?
And if you need any more convincing, Sam Shepard and Fred Ward round out the cast.
Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017)
A dark fairy tale about a gang of five children trying to survive the horrific violence of the cartels and the ghosts created every day by the drug war.
If this season got you interested in the filmography of writer/director/showrunner Issa López, then you're not alone. I haven't seen Tigers Are Not Afraid, but I'll be putting it on Shudder soon, largely because it (apparently) explores a lot of the same themes and storytelling devices: it's a horror-fantasy crime drama told through urban legends and magical realism.
HBO is bringing López back for a fifth season, so this will be mandatory homework for both you and I before that happens.
The Thing (1982)
In remote Antarctica, a group of American research scientists are disturbed at their base camp by a helicopter shooting at a sled dog. When they take in the dog, it brutally attacks both human beings and canines in the camp and they discover that the beast can assume the shape of its victims. A resourceful helicopter pilot and the camp doctor lead the camp crew in a desperate, gory battle against the vicious creature before it picks them all off, one by one.
The first five minutes of Night Country felt like The Thing and then it never felt that way again, so we'll put it in the final spot on this list. If you wanted the mystery of the Tsalal scientists to lean more into the sci-fi of it all, you'll get it here with this story of snow-trapped scientists getting picked off one by one by an alien creature. This movie is so good, its excellence explains why I wanted the intro of the show to be more like it. It's probably the best movie on this list, but it's the least like True Detective.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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