Amazon's New Epic Historical Drama Is Grim, Gruesome—and Gorgeous
The Narrow Road to the Deep North , Amazon Prime Video's recent World War II miniseries, is traumatic in multiple ways. One of those ways involves Jacob Elordi, the extremely tall Australian actor whose starring role in this has tricked some of his fans—who want to see him in a romantic historical drama and aren't pacified by sneak peeks from the set of Wuthering Heights —into watching a show that is, to put it lightly, incredibly bleak. “Amazon's cover image is really misleading,” said a Redditor . “I keep seeing posts from Prime with ONLY the romantic scenes,” another said. “Posting TikTok ads with clips of Dorrigo and Amy captioned 'bring back men who are yearn' is crazy business and sells a super distorted vision of what the show really is.” Other, wiser fans know their limits: “I saw a DELICIOUS gif of Jacob Elordi's back from this show on twitter but unfortunately I don't watch war films,” one such comment added. (Here is the GIF, and it's NSFW .)
The five-episode series, which is adapted from Richard Flanagan's 2014 Man Booker–winning novel of the same name , is a gorgeous, moody historical show that has been flying under the radar since its April 18 release, even while maintaining very high Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd ratings. (The first two episodes premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, and the show's director, Elordi's fellow Aussie Justin Kurzel, comes from film, most recently directing 2024's well-reviewed The Order ; that is to say, this series is ambitious.) Maybe that's an artifact of the streaming era, when we all just have too much television to watch, or maybe it's because the story is grim in the extreme, and although it twines a love story with a war story, it's still quite hard to fit into the “period romance” genre, no matter how much Prime Video's marketing team tries.
The story follows the life of Dorrigo Evans (played by Elordi, primarily), a twentysomething doctor who has a brief, hot affair with his uncle's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), while he's engaged to another woman, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), then immediately ships out to fight, spending most of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese army in Thailand, the commanding officer of hundreds of miserable, starving men. Afterward, he comes home, marries Ella, and never speaks to Amy again. Flanagan's father spent three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, working on the Thai–Burma Railway, a doomed project that cost the lives of 90,000 civilians and 16,000 prisoners of war, and the character of Dorrigo is based partially on him and partially on real-life surgeon and officer Edward “Weary” Dunlop . Because of this grounding in real life, the publication and the Man Booker–ification of Narrow Road was a huge literary and historical moment in Australia; accordingly, the miniseries features many Australian actors and was filmed in New South Wales.
The show has three timelines, with three distinct visual and aural settings. There's the seaside, near Adelaide, where Dorrigo visits his uncle's pub during the time right before he's shipped out, and carries out his love affair with Amy. These scenes, backed by the sound of rushing waves, have a golden heat to them. You can see the pub's midcentury lack of air conditioning in the sweat on the actors' bodies, and in Amy's desperate gulping-down of a glass of water before her first tryst with Dorrigo. (It's these scenes, and the chemistry between Elordi and Young, that are inspiring those yearning Elordi TikTok edits.)
Then there's the jungle, loud with nature sounds and constantly dripping wet. There's an indelible image when Dorrigo, having first arrived with his men at the prisoner-of-war camp, still in a flush of “Maybe we'll get through, if we keep up our morality” delirium, glimpses a group of emaciated prisoners in rags who've been there longer. This is his future: diminishment, hunger, beriberi, lice, ringworm, suppurating ulcers. When you see this group of skeletal men, the contrast between the look of their prisoners' bodies and the relentless activity of the jungle conveys a deep sense of foreboding. The other jungle-camp scenes—an amputation without anesthesia; a beheading; a protracted beating that's terrible to watch—are brown and green with foliage and mud, both monotonous and unbelievably upsetting.
The third timeline, with Ciarán Hinds as an older Dorrigo and Heather Mitchell as his long-suffering wife Ella, takes place in Sydney in the 1980s, mostly in this miserable couple's gorgeous modernist house. Dorrigo, now a surgeon and a public figure, is working on a speech he needs to give at the opening of a gallery show exhibiting the drawings that one of his men did of their time on the railroad. The dominant impression is upper-class, poisonous silence. “This series gives me anxiety of being in a loveless marriage and not being chosen,” one commentator on TikTok said of the show, and although others mocked this user for focusing on the romance rather than the war, it's true that the ennui of Dorrigo and Ella's later life is a sad mirror of the trapped, traumatic feeling of the camp. “I don't think Dorrigo has friends,” Ella says; in one dreamlike visual, he hovers in the air 6 feet over her as they sleep in bed—what's between them is an impassable separation.
This is not a typical “Man comes home from war and suffers PTSD” story, however. The novel, which offers far more character development than the miniseries (that's what novels are good for), poses this possibility: Maybe Dorrigo was never virtuous or good, and his suffering taught him nothing. Flanagan's novel is, as some Redditors have correctly assessed , a classic “great book I never want to read again.” It's not just that the things Dorrigo Evans and his soldiers suffer are awful—way more awful on the page than the screen, by the way; I guess passages like “The man's buttocks were little more than wretched cables, out of which his anus protruded like a turkshead of filthy rope” aren't good candidates for streaming TV adaptation—although they are. It's also that Dorrigo, as a character, experiences two remarkable things in his life, both in his 20s, then stalls out into meaninglessness.
The first of those things is a love that, he thinks at the time, is transcendent, singular, and pure. But it's also one that's transgressive, amplified by its forbidden nature and the wartime setting; you wonder whether Dorrigo and Amy's torrid romance would have mattered this much if the two had met under different circumstances. Then, he's put in the impossible situation of the POW camp, where he is tested and becomes the leader his men call “Big Fella” but also develops a view of the world that sees all that sorrow, suffering, and heroism as contingent, random, and maybe ultimately pointless. In the novel, Dorrigo dies only partially redeemed; he is, to put it bluntly, kind of an asshole, who lies to himself about how much his self-delusion has hurt his wife and children.
But Flanagan surrounds Dorrigo's postwar story with that of other characters who also experience the war and come away with very little greater understanding of life—most memorably, the Japanese officers who ran the POW camp, and who never truly regret it, and the Korean guard most hated by the prisoners, who (we find out) was forced into service by his family's extreme poverty under Japanese colonial rule. The awful scene at the crux of the novel, which also anchors Episode 4 of the TV adaptation, is this guard's beating and killing of “Darky” Gardiner (his name is sanitized in the TV series into “Frank”), a likable, young, part-Aboriginal soldier who turns out to have been connected to Dorrigo in an intimate way that he comes to understand only years later.
You might think these artfully conveyed backstories, connections, or novelistic revelations would make things make sense, but none of them do very much to help the reader escape the story's dominant sense of gloom. War, the novel argues, is not about redemption, and “heroes” like Dorrigo are just regular people who happened to find that in impossible circumstances, performing their duty made them feel better than giving up. In one memorable passage early in the book, Flanagan speaks directly to the reader: “Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.”
This is almost impossible to re-create for the screen: Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant, the series' writer, cannot put Jacob Elordi into a beautiful Amazon Prime production about love and war that leaves people with a “ Horror just is ” vibe. And so, many big and small tweaks are duly made. Ella is much more likable in the show than in the book, which makes Dorrigo's choice to stay with her after the war more understandable. Rather than resisting the idea of preserving his soldier's drawings after his death—because, as novel Dorrigo thinks, “telling the story” will do nothing—TV Dorrigo smuggles his sketchbook out as a matter of course. And in the final episode, at the gallery opening where people come to see Dorrigo talk about the drawings, he amends the speech he's written, to make it scan a bit better to people who want some kind of wisdom and resolution. “Our memory is the only true defense against repeating the miseries of history,” he says, and the camera pulls back to show a wide view of the gallery, with the ghosts of the skeletal POWs surrounding him, in a sort of tacit scene of approval and witness. This is exactly the kind of sop to our latter-day sensibilities that the novel's Dorrigo would disdain.
Still: Jacob Elordi is in an Amazon Prime miniseries about a corner of World War II unfamiliar to many Americans. It's gorgeous, ugly, and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain, and it got me to read a really good novel. At least Kurzel did not give his doomed love story a happy ending, though this must have been tempting. This was a great use of Amazon's money, and I hope the romance-first watchers recover soon.
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