‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Review: Jacob Elordi Is a Prisoner of War and Love in Justin Kurzel’s Violent, Sensuous Epic
When medical officer Dorrigo (Jacob Elordi) licks blood from a wound off the inner thigh belonging to Amy (Odessa Young), who is also his uncle’s wife, it’s a bracing, viscerally erotic moment that captures the overall vibes of Justin Kurzel’s miniseries “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”
The extraordinary first two episodes of the Australian filmmaker’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 novel screened at the Berlin Film Festival, introducing us to Dorrigo (played by Elordi during World War II and Ciarán Hinds in 1989) and the haunted memories of his affair with Amy back in rural Adelaide before being shipped off to battle. Director Kurzel has made the male criminal psyche his signature inquiry, from last year’s “The Order” to 2021 Cannes winner “Nitram,” all based on true crime events. In “The Narrow Road,” he locks into his most sensuous, atmospheric, and brutally violent study yet, this time burrowing into a decent man who becomes spiritually corrupted by war times and an addictive romance.
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Director of photography Sam Chiplin and composer Jed Kurzel achieve a gorgeously moody vision of the Australian southern coast, or the Far East of 1943, where Dorrigo and his cavalry become Japanese prisoners of war, forced into laborious, body-and-soul-killing construction on the Thailand-Burma Railway deep in the jungle. Food, water, and humanity are scarce, with Justin Kurzel building horrifically beautiful tableaux of starved male bodies writhing in torpor as they’re denied even a day’s rest on their task. Elordi dropped considerable weight to play Dorrigo at his lowest. He gives the kind of brooding, Brando-esque performance he’s become known for, smartly eschewing more comfortable studio roles to instead seek daring opportunities that only build upon what’s become one of the best rising resumes in town.
Odessa Young, meanwhile, acclaimed for intense turns as women in erotic frenzy and freefall in films like “Mothering Sunday” and “Shirley,” imbues deeply felt heartache into what could’ve been a mere elusive love-object character. We’ve only seen the first two episodes, but the actors share a screen-scorching chemistry that threatens to overwhelm Dorrigo and Amy in presumably even more destructive ways in what’s to come.
When Dorrigo and Amy cross paths by chance at a bookstore during early days of acquaintance, she shares her favorite poem with him, which consists of only three words: “You burn me.” Oh, how prescient those words will be. That’s to say that “Narrow Road” is also blazingly sexually charged; how unusual for a story of prisoners of war, whose bodies are degraded to points harrowingly far-removed from anything that could be justified as erotic.
The first episode opens in a war zone in Syria, 1941, where the adrenaline rush of the battlefield sinks its terrible claws into Dorrigo, the rookie medical officer, who is unable to save a small boy or another soldier whose body is blown apart by a landmine. Throughout the premiere, Kurzel and editor Alexandre de Franceschi fling us non-linearly anywhere from 1989 Australia to 1943 Thailand, where Dorrigo and his fellow army men are packed like cattle into a train carting them off to the next awful stop on their war journey.
Meanwhile, back in 1940 Melbourne, Dorrigo appears very much in love with Ella (Olivia DeJonge), promising her marriage when he returns from war. But that’s thrown off-course by his encounters with Amy, the much younger wife of his uncle Keith (a sun-tanned, grizzled Simon Baker), who’s blindingly unaware of the sexual energy radiating between his nephew and spouse.
That erotic spark is matched in intensity by the vivid images of war Kurzel conjures in the series’ more brutal stretch in the jungle, where Dorrigo forms a closeness with fellow line partners Frank Gardiner (David Weatherall) and Tiny Middleton (David Howell). Scribe Shaun Grant, who’s written several scripts for Kurzel including “Nitram” and the similarly men-at-battle-charged “True History of the Kelly Gang,” takes special care in carving particulars of the often raunchy male friendships (think a dissipated frat house but with sick, starving men wagging their dicks around to pass the time instead of jocks) forming in the jungle.
Even the Faustian relationship Dorrigo appears to be forming with the dangerous, katani-wielding Colonel Kota (Taki Abe) implies we will be seeing much more of the Japanese infantry in the episodes to come. Grant and Kurzel leave no character unfleshed here in just two brief 45-minute episodes.
Even for a show directed by a straight guy (Kurzel is married to Essie Davis, who in the 1989 segments plays a colleague’s wife the adult Dorrigo is having an affair with), “Narrow Road” takes no shame in capturing the tall, lanky, chiseled Elordi’s physical beauty, the actor next to stark-naked in a couple of scenes. In fact, I’d say “Narrow Road” is more homoerotic than the other way around, never sexualizing the female actors, which is also in line with Kurzel’s approach to “True History of the Kelly Gang,” where George MacKay and Nicholas Hoult were frequently either undressed or cross-dressing. The director’s interest is always in masculinity, and so of course, that must and should include male sexuality, here to riveting and evocative effect.
It’s the chilling scenes of cholera and jungle-induced sickness that stick in the mind, too, with an atmosphere recalling the grimmest of war movie classics. “Narrow Road” occasionally overemphasizes the carnage, like an extended close-up of Hinds’ Dorrigo going rogue in surgery on a patient while extracting a tumor off a liver. But the choice can make for a thrilling contrast to the eroticism on display: This is a world of blood and viscera, body fluids, and entrails, and Kurzel is going to show you all of it. And with a brilliant cast of actors, you’ll want to keep going where this road promises to take you.
Grade: A-
“The Narrow Road to the Deep North” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. Amazon Prime Video will distribute the series in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with Sony Pictures currently seeking a U.S. distributor.
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