‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Review: Jacob Elordi in Justin Kurzel’s Haunting Contemplation of the Losses of Love and War
Following Nitram and The Order, Justin Kurzel goes from strength to strength with his riveting first detour into episodic television, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. While a current of unflinching violence runs through the director’s work, seldom if ever has the blunt shock of bloodletting played in such haunting counterpart to the pathos of brutalized humanity as it does in this adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel. There’s a lingering soulfulness here that feels new to Kurzel’s work, distilled in an intensely moving lead performance from Jacob Elordi.
Big, bold and strikingly cinematic, the limited series’ first two of five 45-minute episodes were presented as a special gala at the Berlin Film Festival ahead of its Australian premiere on Prime Video in April. Most other major markets will follow, though Sony has not yet closed a deal for U.S. rights. With Elordi’s star on the rise, that can only be a matter of time, even if the slangy vernacular of the wartime sections will require subtitles.
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Another recurring theme in Kurzel’s work represented here is the formation of a national Australian identity and the role played by traumatic episodes in the country’s history. The horrific experiences of prisoners of war forced by the Japanese to work as slave labor on the Thailand-Burma railroad during World War II is another painful chapter, given added resonance by the reluctance of many who served and were captured during that conflict to speak or write about it in the decades that followed.
Based on the first 90 minutes, The Narrow Road to the Deep North has potential to stand alongside films like Peter Weir’s Gallipoli and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant as a nuanced and compassionate study of Australians at war.
Skillfully adapted by Kurzel’s frequent collaborator Shaun Grant, the drama benefits from the highly personal feel of the material. That was perhaps inevitable given that Flanagan’s inspiration for the novel came from his father’s experience as a survivor of what became known as “Death Railway,” on which Grant’s grandfather also worked as a POW. Kurzel’s grandfather also was a WWII veteran, one of the so-called “Rats of Tobruk,” the Australian-led division that defended the North African port city from siege by German and Italian forces.
Elordi plays Dorrigo Evans, a medical student who joins Australia’s Armed Forces and loses his first casualties as his company advances through Syria toward the frontline in 1941. The explosion that kills two soldiers is right in Kurzel’s visceral wheelhouse, as is the barbaric treatment of the captured troop two years later. Jammed into a sweltering train compartment like livestock and transported to Thailand, they are put to work by Japanese officers, clearing jungle and constructing track for the railway, which is to stretch for almost 260 miles.
Following the prologue in Syria, Grant’s script jumps between three different time periods, with the 1943 POW scenes providing the spine.
In 1940, Dorrigo is a handsome young transplant from rural Tasmania, with a steamy sexual connection to his girlfriend Ella (Olivia DeJonge), who comes from a wealthy Melbourne family. Her eagerness to marry prods him to propose, even if there’s a vague sense that he’s not ready.
Around the same time, he drives out to a country pub owned by his gregarious Uncle Keith (Simon Baker). Keith is absent when Dorrigo gets there, but he meets the woman his family has referred to as his uncle’s “too young” wife, Amy (Odessa Young). The flirty chemistry between them sets off instant sparks.
In 1989, Dorrigo (played with a brooding demeanor in his senior years by Ciarán Hinds) has settled in Sydney in a fancy piece of waterfront real estate. He’s a successful surgeon, still married to Ella (Heather Mitchell) but having an affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of his medical colleague Rick (Dan Wyllie).
Throughout the wartime scenes, we catch glimpses of a soldier known as Rabbit (William Lodder) filling his artist’s sketchbook with pencil and paint studies of his comrades. Intended to stand as a record of what took place there, the pictures have an awful beauty, expressing in images what words cannot. There’s a slight Francis Bacon aspect to them, poetic but at the same time incontrovertibly real, depicting every distorted limb, every haggard face and emaciated body, every wound and scar.
Dorrigo is roped in, seemingly by Ella, to help with the launch of a book of Rabbit’s art 50 years later. But he’s spiky in interviews and reluctant in the speech he’s writing to tell the stories of heroism and mateship that seem to be Australians’ only interest in accounts of war.
While the time-jumping structure can be mildly confusing at first, editor Alexandre de Franceschi establishes a graceful rhythm, keeping the transitions fluid. Dorrigo’s involvement with the book launch stirs up vivid memories of his time in the Thai jungle, lobbying in vain with the Japanese command to improve conditions for the men, many of them suffering from dysentery, malnutrition and malaria. But despite deaths among the POWs, Colonel Masaki Kota (Taki Abe), under pressure from Tokyo and aware that they have insufficient men to complete the mammoth task, insists on using cruel punishment as motivation for them to work harder.
While collecting materials in the jungle to build the soldiers’ camp, Dorrigo glimpses another group of POWs through the trees. Their skeletal bodies and ghostly faces suggest they have been there considerably longer, giving the medical officer a preview of his worst fears for his men.
Interwoven with those painful memories are moments from his affair with Amy the summer before he shipped out. They serve as a kind of balm for terrible reality in 1943, and in 1989, a source of deep melancholy that makes it clear Dorrigo never felt the same passion for another woman. In a prophetic prewar scene, he runs into Amy in a bookshop after their brief first encounter at the pub. She notes that he’s reading Catullus and responds by showing him her favorite poem, just three words long, by Sappho: “You burn me.”
Elordi, arguably never better, plays the soft-spoken younger Dorrigo with sensitivity and genuine love and concern for his fellow soldiers. There’s an unforced gravitas to his performance that feeds directly into Hinds’ typically authoritative work, portraying him as a hardened man forever burdened by survivor’s guilt. DeJonge and Mitchell find similar continuity between the younger and older Ella, showing how her rosy view of her new husband mellowed into a somber acceptance of his walled-off nature.
Early on, Keith compares the rangy Dorrigo to Errol Flynn — one of Australia’s early exports to Hollywood. But there’s no trace of dashing bravado or heroics in Elordi’s performance, which is grounded, mature and subtle in its communication of unspoken feeling.
Young is lovely as Amy, making her an untamable spirit who takes the lead in seducing Dorrigo — to the tune of Leslie Hutchinson’s 1936 recording of “These Foolish Things” and the light-headedness of too much whiskey — but nonetheless maintains her own kind of loyalty to Keith. Baker follows Limbo with another almost unrecognizable turn that solidifies his rewarding pivot into character parts. Davis, who has been married to Kurzel for more than 20 years, is wonderful as always, and Wyllie, another Australian treasure of screen and stage, makes you hope we’ll see more of his character in the remaining episodes.
Among the soldiers, Thomas Weatherall brings individualistic flavor and warmth to Frank, whose quirky sense of humor extends to taking bets on his survival chances; and David Howell has some of the most wrenching scenes as the ironically nicknamed Tiny, a colossus of a man brought down by illness and inhumanity.
The most intriguing of the Japanese cast is Sh? Kasamatsu (a principal character on Max’s Tokyo Vice) as Major Nakamura, a thoughtful man who seems resistant to Colonel Kota’s instruction to be more merciless. His exchanges with Dorrigo suggest a relationship that will evolve in future episodes. We read the discomfort on his face as Koto addresses the POWs, who are basically slaves, insisting that there is honor in the work they are doing for the glory of Japan.
On the craft side, Alice Babidge’s understated production and costume design distinguish each period without fuss, while there’s impressive depth of field and interesting compositions in cinematographer Sam Chiplin’s widescreen images. As usual with the director’s work, a full-bodied, mood-shifting score by his younger brother Jed Kurzel is a major contribution, particularly unsettling in its use of dissonance in the Thai scenes.
History experts may take issue, as they did with the book, that the Australian POWs were a significantly smaller part of the railway workforce than Southeast Asian civilians captured and exploited by the Japanese. But neither the novel nor the series require justification for keeping the focus trained on Australian soldiers whose sacrifice and suffering are an unerasable part of the country’s blood-stained past.
The book is a towering achievement in Australian fiction, widely recognized as a classic of war literature and a work of national cultural importance — not to mention a gripping, psychologically complex read. No doubt the creative team felt a responsibility to get it right, and based on what’s been seen so far, they appear to have accomplished that.
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