‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Review: Justin Kurzel’s Atmospheric Series Tells An Immersive Story Of Wartime Trauma – Berlin Film Festival

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To this day, Kanchanaburi remains a hot destination — in every sense — for Australian and British tourists who come to pay tribute to prisoners of war who died under the Japanese lash, building the Burma Railway.

Kanchanaburi is where the bridge crosses the River Kwai, subject of one of the most beloved war stories in cinema. The real sufferings of those prisoners has also been well chronicled, but, even so, Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which drew on his own father’s experience, found a new kind of narrative behind that history: a story of trauma that bleeds from war into a difficult peace and, while largely unspoken, lasts a lifetime, His novel went on to win the Booker Prize, the top international prize for literature in English.

Adapted as a five-part series by Australian director Justin Kurzel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a mild-natured medical student who habitually carries a book of poetry in his pocket, following him first as a hesitant youth, conscripted as an army medic and captured by the Japanese, and then through the long, ostensibly successful life that follows, when he becomes a surgeon, art patron and reluctant ribbon-cutting war hero.

In the first two episodes, shown at the Berlinale, the narrative slides between two periods: 1943 and 1989. Jacob Elordi plays Dorrigo Evans’ younger self, stumbling into an engagement with a girlfriend from a wealthy family (Olivia DeJonge) while falling in love with his uncle’s wife Amy (Odessa Young), a bohemian youngster who has clearly done some regrettable matrimonial stumbling herself.