The film adaptation of the award -winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North was announced by Richard Flanagan in 2018. Nevertheless, seven years should pass for the shattering story of a soldier who cannot escape the light of day in a Japanese prisoner of war in Thailand during the Second World War.
The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea runs at the Berlinale in 2025 and takes a dark chapter in human history that, after looking at it, is still busy. This is not just one ingenious actor combinationbut also the strong staging of The Order director Justin Kurzel, who contrasts the cruelty of unexpected beauty through a touching network of memory.
From prisoners of war to surgeon: This is the story of The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea
The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea begins with the silhouettes of soldiers against orange-brownishly glowing background. We have seen this picture many times in the cinema, from Apocalypse NOW to 1917. However, this is not a series of war that continues the legacy of Band of Brothers and Co. The adaptation written by Shaun Grant (Mindhunter) is more interested in the time before and after the trenches.
First we get to know the Australian soldiers Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) in 1943, where he is captured with his comrades under inhumane conditions Construction of the Thailand-Burma railway line drives forward. The suffering and exhaustion are written in the face of the men. Her bodies are drawn by the hard work and wrap themselves in a cocoon of mud and dirt.
In his memories, Dorrigo escapes into the time before the war, when he had an affair with his uncle’s wife. Every time Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young) appears in one of the light -flooded shots, he briefly forgets the horror and a completely different world appears. However, this is not free of doubt – just like the storyline, which unfolds in Australia in 1989.
Dorrigo (now played by Ciarán Hinds) has become a star surgeon from the war veteran and is about to publish his memoirs. Loss in thought, he looks through unnaturally silent and sterile spaces that could hardly differ from the humid jungle. Kurzel nevertheless skilfully interweaves all the time levels with flowing image crossing that Dorrigo brought back into the nightmare.
In The Narrow Road to the deep Sea, the spirit of Terrence Malick and Claire Denis flashes
Kurzel delivered his most visually impressive film with Macbeth in 2015, which converted the battlefields of the Shakespeare film to a fire-red hell, through which the figures like spirits wandered out of the hereafter. Kurzel also relies on atmospheric pictures in The Narrow Road to the deep North. This time he leans against one of the most unusual film films: the narrow ridge.
Rarely were beauty and horror as close together as in the masterpiece staged by Terrence Malick, while the voice from the off takes us on an existential border tour. Kurzel is of course not Malick, but his work in some passages reminds of the way the soldiers are captured by the camera in the narrow ridge – their eyes, their eyes, their bodies.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North spends a lot of time with the soldiers who are close. One sweaty, emaciated body mass in the darkthat threatens to disappear deeper and deeper in a hole in the earth. Claustrophobic, devastating. Sometimes these moments like the hopeless response to the body cinema of Claire Denis’ the foreign legionnaire feel.
But then Kurzel puts his characters into the water and lets them hover at least for a moment as if they had actually strayed in a film by Terrence Malick. The heavy elos in the water run as a connecting element through all levels of the film: Dorrigo in love with Amy, Dorrigo lost in a water in Thailand, Dorrigo lonely in a pool in Australia.
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The acting combination Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds is the unexpected strength of the war series
The scenes in Thailand are definitely the strongest in the series. The transition from Jacob Elordi to Ciarán Hinds still turns out to be a stroke of genius every time when the youth of the rising Hollywood star from Euphoria and Priscilla passes into Hinds’ thoughtful and at the same time stone face. Where Elordi’s body blurs with the other soldiers, Hinds paralyzes loneliness.
Kurzel observes the older version of the figure from a distance and through the reflections on glass flats. Hinds’ Dorrigo looks significantly less present and tangible than his young image because he is trapped in memories that he cannot share. Hero stories are expected, but Dorrigo desperately searches for a way to finally formulate what Kurzel shows with his shattering pictures.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North proves to be a commuting in plague thoughts. Dorrigo is a fictitious figure. His story, which was inspired by real events and the reports of Australian prisoners of war, feels very tangible through the clever casting and many haunting moments, especially if it drifts completely vulnerable through the war environment.
We read the first two episodes of The Narrow Road to the deep North as part of the Berlinale 2025. In total, the mini series comprises five episodes. In Germany, she celebrates its premiere at Sky and the Streaming Service in the summer of 2025.