Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends "one of the best television series of the year" - THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH (Justin Kurzel, Australia, 2025)

Jacob Elordi

Turning a book as detailed as Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize winner into a film or a television adaptation isn’t easy. There’s a lot to get in. 

But this exemplary and extraordinary five-part screen version comes pretty close.

Even Flanagan’s brooding literary style is successfully created through an alchemical combination of Justin Kurzel’s hypnotic direction, Shaun Grant’s restrained screenplay, Sam Chiplin’s atmospheric cinematography; Jed Kurzel’s aching score and the note-perfect work from the cast. 

Following the structure of Flanagan’s novel, Shaun Grant splits the life of the central character Dorrigo Evans into three timelines.

Early in the Second World War, stationed in Adelaide, Dorrigo (Jacob Elordi) strays from his wealthy fiancé Ella (Olivia DeJonge), to have an affair with his uncle’s younger wife Amy (Odessa Young) before he ships off to Syria. 

Later captured in south-east Asia, he serves time as a surgeon and an Australian prisoner of war in the notorious hell-hole of the Burma Railway (aka The Death Railway). At 77 years of age in the late 1980s, Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds), now long married to Ella (Heather Mitchell), is still a surgeon, but has become a celebrated and reluctant war hero, permanently haunted by the hidden demons of post-traumatic stress.  

Kurzel and Grant don’t blink from showing three of the major horrors Flanagan describes in his novel. There’s a beheading, somehow ritualistically portrayed and excused by a Japanese soldier as some sort of an aesthetic, energizing gift to the Emperor. There’s an operation to amputate a gangrenous leg using little more than a knife, a saw, a spoon and some string; and then a vicious hours-long beating to death of Dorrigo’s great friend Darky Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall) while the POWs are forced to watch.

Richard Flanagan

Not all of Darky Gardiner’s story from Flanagan’s book has made it to the screen, however. In the book, the 77-year-old Dorrigo Evans talks with his brother Tom Evans (not in the television series), and Tom tells him he once had an affair with his next-door neighbour’s wife Mrs Jackie Maguire, “a blackfella, you know”. The offspring, an illegitimate boy brought up by “a family called Gardiner”, later “died during the war. My only son and I never met him”. Very late in his life, Dorrigo learns Darky Gardiner, his loyal mate in the jungle, so viciously and callously murdered by the Japanese, was his nephew.

The Burma Railway was designated as a war crime committed by the Japanese and 32 of their military were sentenced to death. A total of 90,000 south-east Asians died during construction (Malaya Tamils, Javanese, Burmese, Thai) and 12,000 Allied soldiers (British, Australian, Dutch, New Zealanders and a Canadian).

Dorrigo Evans, as confused and messy in love as he is working to prevent death from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, cholera and murder by the Japanese, is a triumphal creation from Flanagan. The writer’s father was on The Death Railroad, under the command of the legendary surgeon Sir Ernest Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, whose medical work and leadership capacities clearly inspired the character of Dorrigo.

If this all sounds like too hard a watch, you’d be missing out on what will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the best television series of the year. From anywhere. 

Ciaran Hinds