By Bob Grimm

Jodie Foster and Kali Reis deliver electric performances in True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the acclaimed anthology series—and, without a doubt, one of its best.

As of now, five of the fix episodes have aired. It’s a murder mystery, and to the show’s massive credit, I have no clue where this show is going, and no idea how it will end. It has kept me guessing.

Set in Alaska at a time when it’s always dark, Night Country features Foster as Liz Danvers, a local sheriff investigating the odd deaths of a group of men from a science lab. The victims are found out in the ice in what can be described as a “corpsicle”—a bunch of frozen, screaming-as-they-died men fused together. The gory visual owes more than a little to John Carpenter’s The Thing, as do other portions of this season of True Detective.

Foster hasn’t been this good in more than 20 years; in fact, this performance is one of the best of her career. Her Danvers is complicated and often very unpleasant, although Foster manages to keep you rooting for her, no matter how bad her behavior becomes. Reis, as Navarro, is just as good, playing another officer on the force who is haunted by an unsolved murder she thinks is tied to the current case.

The likes of John Hawkes, Christopher Eccleston and Finn Bennett provide excellent supporting performances. The atmospherics provide a continuous sense of dread—it’s always dark, always cold and always dangerous. The show is as much a triumph of art direction as it is of acting.

True Detective: Night Country has been a very good exercise in murder mystery and atmospheric horror for five of its intended six episodes. Let’s see if it sticks the landing.

True Detective: Night Country is airing on HBO and streaming on Max.