Let's Talk About Kali Reis's Performance in "Night Country"
Some thoughts on "Night Country," three episodes in.
Three episodes into True Detective: Night Country, an icy thriller that’s set in the Arctic Circle’s disorienting endless night, led by two women, anchored by a gripping mystery and squarely focused on Alaska Native identity and generational tensions, I’m left scratching my head, wondering why I’m still struggling to muster more emotional investment in this show that, on paper, feels like a knockout.
Night Country has all the ingredients of a groundbreaking series — in many ways, it’s already groundbreaking, because one of HBO’s biggest Sunday night shows is telling a strong Native story. But the heart of a show isn’t its themes or subject matter. It’s in its characters, and our two protagonists — Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) — often feel like the show’s least emotionally compelling elements.
I’ve already written about how Danvers’s apparent straightness severely limits the character’s believability. As for Navarro, I’m on my hands and knees, crawling through the sand dunes of stoicism, desperate for the elixir of an expression that isn’t brooding.
Outside of acting, Reis is a world champion boxer, and the first Indigenous American woman to hold that title. (She’s Seaconke Wampanoag and Cape Verdean, and two spirit.) In 2018, HBO aired a female boxing match for the first time in its 45-year history — a match that paired Reis against Cecilia Braekhus (don’t worry about who won). Three years later, she’d star in Catch the Fair One, playing a champion boxer who embeds herself in a sex trafficking ring. It was her first acting role ever; she snagged an Independent Spirit Awards nomination for the performance.
“Reis is untrained as an actor, but authenticity like hers cannot be manufactured or even ‘acted,’” Sheila O'Malley wrote at RobertEbert.com. “Reis exudes unmanaged grief and single-minded focus, a challenging mix.”
This is an incredibly easy person to root for; who wouldn’t want to see Reis knock this outta the park? But in Night Country, her performance feels stiff, one-note, all narrowed eyes and tense shoulders without much perceived vulnerability or emotional range. Reis does bring some depth to the role — her measured physicality does a lot to convey a character who deeply feels things; who’s thoughtful, whose actions and words are considered. But if this is how Reis is choosing to play Navarro — that she’s intentionally limiting the range of emotions we’ll ever see from the character — that approach doesn’t lend itself to a particularly interesting character.
Navarro has come face-to-face with some of the series’ spookiest offerings so far: a menacing one-eyed polar bear, an orange thrown back at her feet moments after she chucked it into the snowy abyss, a possessed man. And in all of those situations, her stoicism has remained steadfast. At most, we get a raised eyebrow, a slow walk backwards, a look in the eyes that says “woah.” In those moments, it just feels a bit unrealistic.
Take this week’s most recent episode, “Night Country: Part Three.” Remember that knot of frozen scientists discovered at the end of episode one? Well, one of those corpses was alive, and he’s recovering in the hospital. Danvers and Navarro question Dr. Lund from his hospital bed — he mostly howls in agony, but manages to whisper a few ominous warnings. “We woke her,” he says in a vaguely German accent. “And now she’s out there, in the ice.”
Dr. Lund begins howling maniacally and is quickly sedated. Then, a fight breaks out in the hospital waiting room, and Danvers rushes off to deal with that. This leaves Navarro alone with the unconscious Dr. Lund.
After a few beats, and with Navarro positioned outside his room, Dr. Lund slowly sits up in bed (reminder: this man should be zonked off his ass).
“Hello, Evangeline,” he says when upright. He’s speaking in a deep, menacing growl without a whiff of Germanic intonation.
The voice is terrifying. Navarro turns around.
“Your mother says hello,” the clearly-possessed Dr. Lund says. Navarro’s mother is dead, making this an incredibly disturbing comment to hear. Here’s how we see that disturbance expressed:
“She’s waiting for you,” Dr. Lund says in his gravely demon speak, then slowly raises his black, frostbitten hand and points squarely at Navarro.
After this, Dr. Lund slowly leans back into bed. When he touches down, his body relaxes, as if whatever possessed him has exited his form. Then, he starts violently convulsing.
Pretty disturbing stuff, right? The kind of stuff that’d make you pee your pants, or scream, or race through the halls, howling about the demonically possessed man who just relayed a message from your dead mother? Or, maybe you’d react to this the way Navarro reacted: with a perplexed frown!
OK. OK. I’m being petty! I’ll stop. It’s definitely worth noting that Reis hasn’t had the richest text to work with. In anticipation of writing about Night Country, I rewatched True Detective’s first season. By that show’s third episode, we knew spades more about Marty (Woody Harrelson) and Rust (Matthew McConaughey) than we currently know about Danvers and Navarro. We knew Marty was — and saw Marty act — misogynistic, violent, prideful, and unbelievably hot-tempered. We knew Rust was a nihilist, that he lacked any speck of faith in humanity, that his suffered losses and massive emotional capacity left him viewing the universe as brutal and meaningless. We learned this on long car drives, in Marty and Rust’s one-on-one interviews with present day investigators, in conversations at crime scenes that had nothing to do with the crime itself.
The first 19 minutes of True Detective’s premiere episode are just spent with Marty and Rust — 13 minutes at the crime scene, six minutes in the car. That episode also shows Marty and Rust going on three interviews together, Rust meeting Marty’s family at a deeply uncomfortable family dinner, and Marty defending Rust to upper brass at the risk of his own reputation. All of that … in the first episode alone! In Night Country’s premiere, it takes 19 minutes for us to see Danvers and Navarro in the same room as one another. In that sense, it makes sense that Reis’s performance has felt less-than-gripping. The actor hasn’t had much material to pull from.
Night Country’s plot is far denser than that of True Detective, and that plot is gobbling up time that could otherwise be used to develop our central characters. Those mysteries and plot threads have quickly become my favorite part of the show — it’s clear that Night Country’s creator and showrunner, Issa López, sought to center the season on an explicitly Native story, and took meticulous care to accurately represent those populations in her storytelling.
But even the sturdiest narrative framework for a series crumbles if there aren’t emotionally rich characters at the heart of the show. Night Country’s central mystery and sharp focus on Alaska Natives is gripping and timely — had I not already committed to writing about each episode, it’d be the only thing keeping me coming back each week. I just wish I could read that story on my own, without having to spend more time with two characters who feel like roadblocks to Night Country’s more urgent, emotionally interesting elements.