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• The Guardian
• Thu Apr 17 2025

Many great directors have been attracted to war movies ? or, as is the case with Australian auteur Justin Kurzel, a war-themed series, adapting Richard Flanagan?s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Film-makers of a certain calibre seem to view this genre as a rite of passage. Some productions ? including the recent Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air ? have a retrograde flavour, painting war (perhaps problematically) as a great big adventure. Many lean into spectacle, attempting to recreate the smoke and fury of battle, but in the process running the risk of celebrating or ennobling war. ?Every film about war,? declared Fran?ois Truffaut, ?ends up being pro-war.?

But The Narrow Road to the Deep North feels quite different from most war narratives, with a deeply layered central character and a heavy, morose tone of contemplation. There?s very little battlefield action, the war elements mostly taking place in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where many soldiers, including Australian medical student protagonist Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi), are forced to work on the Burma railway. There?s nothing remotely glamorous here.

View image in fullscreen ?Throughout, the show is deep-thinking, eschewing myopic patriotism.? Photograph: Ingvar Kenne/Curio/Sony Pictures Television

The story takes place in three time periods: pre, during and postwar. In the latter, Dorrigo is played by Ciar?n Hinds. He has become a venerated, surly Sydney-based surgeon with a fierce glare and powerful turn of phrase. In one early scene he?s questioned by a journalist about his description of the Japanese as ?monsters,? saying she?s spoken to Japanese survivors who?ve lost everything, citing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the show is deep-thinking, eschewing myopic patriotism.

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Neither side is championed or vilified ? although the show certainly doesn?t turn a blind eye to the horrors committed by the Japanese in the camp, with several confronting and cinematically staged scenes, including one in which a prisoner is beheaded. The camp has both a tyrannical, horrifically violent colonel (Taki Abe) and a major (Sh? Kasamatsu) who develops a fraught friendship with Dorrigo. There?s an aching feeling that war pulls everybody in terrible directions.

View image in fullscreen Complex relationships with women ? Elordi with Olivia DeJonge as his fiancee in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Photograph: Ingvar Kenne/Curio/Sony Pictures Television

The way Kurzel depicts Dorrigo?s relationships with women is also quite complex, not condemning him for the kinds of behaviour often viewed as moral mistakes. Before the protagonist is shipped off to war, while engaged to a woman (Olivia DeJonge) from a well-to-do family, he has a deep, intense sexual relationship with Amy (Odessa Young), the wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker). In the postwar timeline, he has an affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of his colleague Rick (Dan Wyllie).

Elordi and Hinds? finely balanced performances, as the young and older Dorrigo, really feel like different reflections of the same person, strikingly distinct in some aspects but inseparable in essence. The three timelines are smoothly integrated ? less a mosaic than a river current ? swirling, overlapping, forming and unforming.

Narrow Road has a stately aura, stiffer and more formal than most of Kurzel?s work, with less of his signature tone ? which is scuzzy and elegiac while somehow also elegant and poetic. You never doubt the show?s realism, or the compassion underpinning it. This is less about the theatre of war than the psychological stain it leaves.