Six months after director Justin Kurzel confirmed himself as a poet of machismo with 2024’s “The Order,” and six months before star Jacob Elordi will unleash his own take on Dr. Victor’s monster on the 2025 fall festivals, the Australian duo have dropped an altogether unexpected Frankenstein in frigid Berlin. Directed by Kurzel, and led by Elordi, the upcoming miniseries “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” plays as an intriguing genre mash-up that fuses the burly head of a war-drama onto the lithe body of a primetime soap.
Or perhaps the other way around — as the filmmakers premiered just two episodes of the eventual five-part series at the Berlin Film Festival, raising more questions than answers by previewing a time-hopping narrative that refuses easy classification.
Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s prizewinning novel, the prestige drama is less ambiguous about its protagonist, mind you. We follow rakish doctor Dorrigo Evans across three distinct timelines, first catching him fresh out of med school in 1940, bright eyed and bushy tailed and played by Jacob Elordi, and then acting cynical and spent in 1989, now looking an awful lot like Ciarán Hinds. How one gave way to the other is almost certainly the subject of the middle timeline, once again carried by Elordi, which finds Dorrigo a prisoner of the Japanese army in Southeast Asia of 1943.
Thankfully, we never lose our bearings, with each timeline elegantly playing off one another through Alexandre de Franceschi’s skillful crosscutting. That all three follow markedly different rhythms also doesn’t hurt.
So let’s turn back the clock to Oz of 1940, where dashing Dorrigo stoically awaits his deployment. All duded up and in no rush to go, he bides his time by falling into a torrid affair, captured with the requisite period flair expected of all wartime romances.
In Melbourne, we find Dorrigo’s young fiancée Ella (Olivia DeJonge) — an upper class scion of state, whose own uncle wrote the bloody constitution. And off in Adelaide is bohemian “aunt” Amy (Odessa Young) — the much younger new bride of Dorrigo’s one-time uncle-by-marriage Keith (Simon Baker). Rest easy if you couldn’t catch all that, and let the familiar cast and lush production value carry you through. The Big Themes are all there — jealousy and class and duty and forbidden love — as are the appealing locations, perfect to hide a furtive kiss along the dunes or in a smoky, art-deco jazz club. You know how these kinds of impossible romances go.
Need proof? Just skip ahead four decades. Dorrigo (now Hinds) and Ella (Heather Mitchell) are still together, now under the vaulted ceilings of a modernist palazzo whose glass walls reveal nothing but coast. And the old cad is still philandering – though clearly no longer with Amy, and tellingly, with Ella seemingly aware. Perhaps she allows him some reprieve, because the older doc stays haunted by wartime experience and uncomfortable with the noblesse oblige requirements of elevated social class. Or perhaps that kind of cad-play is just a requirement of the genre.
Though streaked with the same downcast intensity common across all of Kurzel’s work, this later section nevertheless treads new ground, mixing real-estate porn with playful adultery, taking the filmmaker to hospital galas, posh locales and other havens of idle wealth – the world, in other words, of the pop melodrama. Kurzel’s typically arid affect even tips toward camp once the colleague Dorrigo’s been cuckolding comes to Ella to propose a counter-affair of their own.
Still, any concerns that Kurzel’s gone soft will more than quickly be allayed by the series’ middle timeline, set in a POW work camp somewhere in the Thai jungle. As should come with no great surprise, the brawny world of men at war finds Kurzel in his element, as the filmmaker more than meets the material with haunted and often staggering compositions. A shot from inside the POW rail car finds the transported prisoners a monochrome mass of pale flesh, lit to emphasize every last bead of sweat draping them like a pall, while Dorrigo’s glimpse of an even-more emaciated group of zombie POWs — ones who had clearly arrived on a previous prisoner convoy — stays on screen for a scant few seconds, all lingering the mind forever more.
If Dorrigo’s survival is never in question, the soulful decency that Elordi projects very much is — even over the course of two, 45-minute episodes we can trace a doleful evolution watching the actors’ affects and countenance grow thin and sharp. Working from a script by Shaun Grant, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” makes fine use of its more novelistic storytelling rhythms, parsing out information at an unhurried pace and opening up to include the Japanese officers’ perspectives in the second installment. Two episodes with three more to go, the glimpse presented in Berlin leaves viewers deeply invested and all too curious where the series will go next.
