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Irish Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch
There are war movies and there are movies about war, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North ( BBC One, Sunday nights, 9pm), Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker -winning novel about the forced construction of the Burma-Thai Railway by Australian prisoners of war (POWs), falls unambiguously into the latter category. This is Kurzel's first foray into television, but he gives short shrift to the conventions of the medium, essentially making a five-hour film of unflinching savagery and darkness. The darkness is both figurative and literal. The Narrow Road is a gruelling watch. It is also a strain on the eyes, with much of the action shrouded in shadow, making it often difficult to discern what is going on. That is perhaps a mercy. Much like the book, the series is a rebuttal to cinema's historic tendency to portray the second World War as a jolly jaunt in distant climes. The moral centre of the piece is Belfast actor Ciarán Hinds . He plays the older version of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon from Tasmania captured by the Japanese in Indonesia and forced to labour on the notorious Burma Death Railway. READ MORE As empathetically brought to life by Hinds, Evans is a successful doctor who reluctantly recalls his war years for a journalist. But just below the patrician surface lurks unresolved trauma. The source of that pain is made dreadfully clear in the flashbacks to the war, where the young Evans is played with charismatic stoicism by Jacob Elordi . Flanagan's novel drew on his own father's experience of war. Kurzel's version hits like a sort of negative image of David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai. That film depicted the war in southeast Asia as a triumph of stiff upper lips over Japanese cruelty. But the Narrow Road to the Deep North removes all the romance. In its place, there is nothing but cruelty and humiliation, exposed ribs and unmasked savagery. The awfulness to come is hinted at in an early scene in which Evans' unit is taken prisoner by the Japanese, who declare their incarceration an incomprehensible shame and that the only way the POWs can redeem themselves is by building a railway. To their captors, Evans and his comrades are dead already. What follows is not a punishment but natural retribution for their lack of honour. Horror is blended with heartache through flashbacks, in which Evans embarks on an enthusiastic affair with his uncle's wife (Odessa Young) shortly before shipping out to war – and despite being engaged to his girlfriend (Olivia DeJonge). Oddly, the same plot device is central to Sebastian Faulks' first World War elegy, Birdsong. What is it about young men who are about to potentially meet their maker and the forbidden rhapsody of the love of an older woman? Sunday nights on the BBC tend to be dedicated to superior, cosy crime or binge-worthy drama. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is something else. It's slow, difficult TV. But it is worth the effort, and Hinds has never been more commanding as a man who has left hell but knows hell will never leave him. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is on BBC 1, Sunday, 9pm
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Narrow Road to the Deep North review
There is an overwhelming darkness to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker prize-winning novel. Thematically, this is to be expected: it is about a group of Australian prisoners of war constructing the Burma railway in the mid-1940s, at the tail end of the second world war. It is about the lasting trauma of conflict and imprisonment. It spans half a century, and though it tempers its darkness with a rich love story, it is largely violent, fatalistic and sorrowful. But visually, too, you may find yourself fiddling with the contrast and brightness settings. This very much matches its mood to its palette. Jacob Elordi is perfectly handsome and haunted as the younger Dorrigo, a poetry-loving doctor who is about to be married to the well-to-do and socially connected Ella (Olivia DeJonge). The show covers three timelines, two of which follow closely on from one another. Elordi takes the main shift, Dorrigo as a young man. It opens in the thick heat of battle, going straight into the action. Young soldiers trade barbs with gallows humour, as they joke and tease, and place bets on how long they think they are going to live. Their banter is interrupted by exploding mines, the casualties already considerable, just a few moments in. The survivors are captured and put to work on the railway. It is hellish from the off, a vivid nightmare of torture and a tale of impossible endurance. Forty-nine years later, towards the end of the 1980s, Ciarán Hinds is the older Dorrigo, a successful, wealthy and celebrated surgeon, still married to Ella (now played by Heather Mitchell). Dorrigo is brooding, even more haunted and undergoing a reckoning with his own history. He is also celebrated as a war hero, but he is combative, arrogant, even reckless, in his professional and personal life. He gives a furious television interview, ostensibly about his experiences of war, to promote a book, the nature of which is deliberately abstruse. This enforced reflection causes him to remember what he has tried so hard to forget and, as a drama, flipping between timelines, it builds up a picture of what made him the unhappy, unfaithful man he has become. It does this slowly, convincingly and in great, awful detail. The 1980s storyline, in which Dorrigo's philandering ways are laid bare, provides some respite from the relentless violence. This is visceral, in its truest sense. Kurzel captures the bodily horror of war in an almost confrontationally frank manner. As they hack away at rock and trees, the men are emaciated, filthy, full of malaria and dysentery. The camera nestles in among them, and hovers above, conveying a real sense of their closeness and suffering. At one point, a leg must be amputated. This is a gory and drawn-out ordeal. At least, in the darkness, it is partially obscured, though the audio alone is gruesome enough. For all of its bodily horrors, this is a passionate, full-bodied love story too, a strand that is delicately balanced but just as impactful. Before he is called up, Dorrigo visits his uncle Keith (a small, mighty performance from Simon Baker) and is immediately drawn to Keith's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young). She is intrigued, if not impressed, but when they meet again at a poetry reading in a bookshop, after Dorrigo has become engaged to Ella, that initial spark ignites into a forest fire. It takes time for their mutual attraction to become more than yearning and longing, lingering looks and touches, but the pacing of it is moving and affecting. Compared to the grinding chaos of the jungle, their affair is sad and beautiful, as romantic as it is doomed. This is a literary drama and it makes no apologies for that. Dorrigo loves Catullus and Aeschylus. The men perform Romeo and Juliet for each other in the jungle. Amy cements her attraction to Dorrigo with a fragment of Sappho, which reads, simply, 'you burn me'. At times, its novelistic roots are more obviously on show; some of the dialogue is writerly and elevated, as the characters reflect poetically upon human nature and cruelty. And there is much cruelty to consider. There are so many killings, so many deaths, and one particular execution, in the jungle, is one of the most distressing scenes I have watched on television in a long time. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, then, is not an easy prospect, but it is an immensely powerful one, driven by strong performances and a bracing confidence in its ability to tell this story, at its own pace, in its own way. My only complaint is that I would have liked to have been able to see just a little more of it. The Narrow Road to the Deep North aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer in the UK. It is available on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.
Metro
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
All 5 episodes of 'captivating' drama streaming on BBC after agonising wait
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video After a three-month wait, UK viewers can finally watch all five episodes of Jacob Elordi's acclaimed World War Two drama on the BBC. The widely-praised show, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, has secured an impressive 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics who have called it a 'powerful' and 'gritty' watch. Based on Richard Flanagan's 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel, the Amazon Prime series follows Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans (portrayed by the Saltburn actor). Our rugged protagonist is haunted by his past affair with his uncle's wife as he reckons with his time as a far East prisoner of wat building the Burma railway. As put by the synopsis on BBC iPlayer: 'From the passion of forbidden love to the pain of life as a prisoner of war – the unforgettable story of one man's reckoning with the echoes of guilt.' This is a story of love, loss and regret that has already been hailed by US and Australian audiences as the 'utterly immersive' masterpiece finalling arrives on UK shores. 'It's gorgeous, ugly, and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain, and it got me to read a really good novel,' a review in Slate reads. 'There's a visceral quality to most scenes as the show teases out the pains and pleasures of the body along with its grander ideas about the mind, the heart, the world, war,' The New York Times echoed. '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,' The Guardian reflected. Meanwhile, audiences have heartily echoed these glowing words. 'A moving, confronting drama. Like the novel, it jumps about in time, but this mirrors the central character, haunted in old age by the memory of his time on 'the line',' google review elitist20 wrote. 'While I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the show, it was easily one of the most jarring, tragic, and captivating stories I've seen in a long time. It portrays the rawness of life—its profound losses, fleeting moments of love, and the absence of clear redemption or triumph,' Karen Garcia reflected. Tonka truck called it 'beautiful and well acted' while Amanda Orlando said that the 'series just destroyed' them. 'I still cannot think about it without crying. Every moment, and every character, were compelling,' Amanda added in her review. 'Perfection, terrifying and moving to the soul,' Joanne Conrad declared. Band of Brothers: This 10-episode award-winning drama from 2001 is co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and stars Damian Lewis, James McAvoy and Simon Pegg. The series follows the exploits of Easy Company (506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army) across Europe throughout the duration of the war based on real-life testimony. Band of Brothers if available to stream on Now and Sky. All the Light We Cannot See: Based on Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller from 2014, the adaptation is set in the final days of World War Two where the paths of a blind French girl and a German soldier collide. Written by Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight, the show stars newcomer Aria Mia Loberti and Mark Ruffalo. All the Light We Cannot See is available to stream on Netflix Masters of the Air: This star-studded show, based on Donald L. Miller's 2007 non-fiction book, features Ncuti Gatwa, Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan as members of US Army Airforces' 100th Bomb Group. We follow their journey as 'they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany from their base in East Anglia.' Masters of the Air is available to stream on Apple TV+. Elordi is joined by Odessa Young, Olivia DeJonge and Ciaran Hinds in this show directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant. There's no doubt the entire production was an intense labour of love. The cast involved in the prisoner of war storyline underwent a gruelling six-week boot camp to replicate the bodies of the emaciated imprisoned soldiers of the era, as Elordi told The Guardian. 'We were all in it together, so there was this great overwhelming amount of love in the whole process. 'It was incredibly challenging but deeply necessary, of course … because nobody wanted to phone that in or make a mockery of it,' the 28-year-old actor told the publication.' More Trending As mentioned, the show flits between different timelines, which is an essential part of the storytelling brought to life from the page. 'Richard always said to me the most important thing to him – even though he gave his permission for me to really own it in some way as a piece of cinema – was the tapestry of different time changes. 'Being deliberately forced into those different moments of memory were really important to him. That was the only feeling I had going into it,' Justin told Hollywood Reporter. View More » The Narrow Road to the Deep North is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Major stars and Hollywood icons who've appeared in Casualty from Tom Hiddleston to Kate Winslet MORE: John Torode returns to TV for first time since MasterChef sacking for 'racist term' MORE: BBC viewers in awe as father-son duo become first ever to win gameshow's jackpot
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ciarán Hinds: ‘A sex symbol? If that's the way you want to put it, OK'
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is one of the most viscerally challenging novels ever written about war. Set among a group of Australian POWs who have been forced to work on the construction of the Burma railway in 1942, the Booker Prize winner is unsparing in its depiction of violence, starvation and never-ending toil. A new adaptation, which starts on BBC One on Sunday, is equally graphic, and The Telegraph's critic Tim Robey said that one ' would need superhuman stamina to consider binge-ing it '. Yet perhaps the most devastating moment comes at the end when Ella Evans turns to her husband Dorrigo and tells him: 'You're the loneliest person I've ever met.' It's a damning comment after decades of marriage, but Evans is a man still carrying the weight of guilt and failure from his time commanding the POWs, and is also haunted by a doomed love affair. When asked by a journalist to be interviewed about the Second World War, Evans (now a respected-if-maverick surgeon) shuts down. 'There were people who just saw too much,' says Ciarán Hinds, who plays him. 'They'd been through hell. And you don't want to share hell with anybody, do you?' We are talking over Zoom because Hinds is filming in Dublin. He looks fit and relaxed, with those large, slightly sad eyes still penetrating. His voice is warm and rich, his Belfast accent still resonant. While viewers may find his latest project harrowing, Hinds says it is necessary to show such horrors, 'to try and understand the brutality that humans can inflict on each other, and also the suffering that people go through. All that is part of the same life package to me. It's not about indulgence or grossness, it's elemental.' The young Evans is played by Australian heartthrob Jacob Elordi, best known to UK audiences as the Byronic, indolent aristocrat in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. Is he flattered by the casting? 'I was quite surprised,' admits Hinds. 'But poor Jacob Elordi. Look what he turns out like! The horror for his future!' Hinds is perhaps being somewhat disingenuous. At 72, he is still considered a sex symbol. 'Oh, if that's the way you want to put it, OK,' he says, waving the comment away. 'Some of my bones feel old, but my spirit feels kind of lively, just let down by the physical attributes. People tell me I look much younger, [that I am] a much younger spirit when I'm on screen.' It was probably the role of Captain Wentworth, smouldering and secretly sensitive, in Roger Michell's 1995 take on Jane Austen 's Persuasion (considered by many Austen fans as the best adaptation of any of her novels) that set the tone. 'I think it was rather short-lived, but you put any guy in a sailor's frock and people's heads will turn, no matter what.' You would imagine that Hinds has been turning heads since arriving in London from Belfast to study at Rada in the early 1970s. 'I arrived with a bit of a chip on my shoulder just because of what was happening over there [during the Troubles]. It was 1973, it was mayhem. I was at university for a few months, ostensibly studying law, but I applied to drama school in London because there weren't any in Northern Ireland, or I might have stayed. Hinds paints me a picture of a young man 'with flared jeans and really long hair, going round in sandals – Irish hippies were always a bit behind the times, what was hitting London in the late 1960s, we were getting in the early 1970s – but there was a look about me that made my friends a bit scared of me. Why? 'They said it was because I came from Belfast. 'You were different, you just had this hair, you're going like, 'Who wants it?'' But I was lucky because they were very open with me, asking seriously about what was going on back home because they knew there were problems, but they didn't really understand them.' Hinds tells me that as he started to grow accustomed to London life, he began to understand the English. 'I saw the goodness in people. And I was hearing about things like divorce, which didn't happen in Ireland – people suffered each other. I was amazed to hear that parents could still be friends despite it. It was a great revelation.' Hinds doesn't live in Northern Ireland. He has a home in London and one in Paris, in the shadow of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which he shares with his French-Vietnamese wife, actress Hélène Patarot (their daughter, Aoife, is also an actress and appears in the Dune: Prophecy series on Sky). His home in the French capital represents relaxation. 'You know when you go home at the end of the day and just want to put the kettle on? That's what I do when I get to Paris. You know, I have a box of Barry's tea bags. I don't do the cafe life that you should do in Paris, but it's because I live there.' Hinds is relaxed and charming company, yet there is still a residual sense of the 1970s firebrand. When we talk about returning to the country of his birth, he does not rule it out, cheered by what he sees as its evolution. 'I see a lot of changes, in both north and south. I go back a couple times a year to see family, and thank God, it's just a lot more open,' he says. 'I mean, there's still too many flags, and there is still the dark underbelly, but at least it's contained.' It is clear that coming of age during the Troubles (he starred in Kenneth Branagh's award-winning Belfast and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) have left their mark on Hinds. Raised as a Catholic, he tells me he was fortunate enough to do dance and drama out of school where there were no religious boundaries. Yet he also had to endure a segregated education system, and today supports the Integrated Education Foundation charity. 'It's so important that you don't separate Catholic and Protestant kids at the age of four and educate them separately, filling them with versions of 'them' and 'us'. I think [integration] has been happening – very slowly – over the last 30 or 40 years, but it'll take generations to really happen. 'A positive move to integrated education doesn't mean to say that you can't have religion.' It's strange to consider that Hinds has been on our screens for half a century. (He thinks so too: 'God, have I? I haven't been counting!') But then his career has been a slow burn, gradually building up credits in the 1980s in high-profile films such as John Boorman's Excalibur, as well as some meaty theatre (notably Peter Brook's celebrated 1987 staging of The Mahabharata). Today, he is one of a small selection of actors who carry weight in big-budget blockbusters (Frozen, Justice League, Game of Thrones) and high-end passion projects such as a Broadway revival of The Crucible opposite Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw. His performances are all, however, marked by a thoughtfulness, his characters always rooted in a psychological reality. Hinds will soon be seen in a new adaptation of John Steinbeck's East Of Eden for Netflix. I wonder if quality roles such as this are getting harder to come by. 'I think there are still roles out there,' he says carefully. 'It depends on how you look at things. 'If you set your sights high about what your pay grade is or who you expect to be working with, that then obviously narrows your choices and closes doors. 'Things have changed since the big corporates have come in, you know, Netflix and Amazon and Apple,' he says, alluding to the amount of money such companies have at their disposal. 'But it's not about the amount of money they need, because usually they can make them on relatively sane budgets, it's about how much you need to tell the story with authenticity and truth, as opposed to what we made with these special effects. Much of the cinematic universe is turning into one big PlayStation.' Hinds does, however, feel optimistic for the future. 'There will always be space for storytellers and great filmmaking. Maybe the adventure is still on.'
The National
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Fame makes you feel like an impostor, says Jacob Elordi
Fame can eat you alive if you let it. That is one of the lessons of the acclaimed new series Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's a lesson its star, Jacob Elordi, has had to learn the hard way. 'You feel like an impostor,' Elordi tells The National. 'You're met with this public idea of who you are, and it's never going to reflect who you actually are. 'Playing this role taught me that it's better to talk about it than bury it down for the entirety of your life.' The Australian actor, 27, has grappled with a lot in his rise to superstardom. He rocketed to fame in 2018 Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, following that up a year later with the phenomenal HBO series Euphoria. By the time Saltburn hit Amazon Prime Video in 2023, he was seemingly all anyone could talk about. The world saw his talent, to be sure, but things also got weird. He wasn't being treated as a great actor – only as a heart-throb. Increasingly, it seemed that fans and journalists alike couldn't separate him from the image built by his films and series. Perhaps that's why he saw so much of himself in Dorrigo Evans, the lead character of Narrow Road to the Deep North, now streaming on Tod and airing on BeIN TV channels in the Middle East. Dorrigo, just as he was in the Booker Prize-winning Richard Flanagan novel on which the series is based, is stoic – tormented by the divide between his public perception as a war hero and his true self that he keeps hidden inside. 'I felt it in my bones when I first read the book. He felt like a culmination of myself,' says Elordi. But unlike Dorrigo, Elordi isn't going to let the world tell him who he is. He's an actor – and a serious one at that. And while films such as Priscilla gave a hint at what's to come, Narrow Road is the start of his intentional ascent to being one of the best actors of his generation. 'I've grown up as a man of movies, and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I love movies so much,' says Elordi. Narrow Road is also a homecoming. It's his first Australian lead role since moving to Los Angeles in 2017 to pursue his acting career. That's part of why he takes the role so personally. It's not just himself he sees in the character – it's the world he left behind. 'There's this unspoken Australian thing I recognised here. There's so much of my dad in Dorrigo – this stoic Australian man – and all the men I grew up with. It's hard to put it into words – it's just something that's in our bones when you're born here,' Elordi says. When series director and co-creator Justin Kurtzel (Snowtown, The Order) approached Elordi for the role, he wasn't exactly sure what Elordi was about. He knew he was talented, but he had no idea how much Elordi cared about his craft – and cared about his homeland. Kurtzel says: 'In our first conversation, we talked a lot about Australia and being back here, and our love of Australian film. 'I was really impressed with his curiosity. He just felt like a serious actor who was deeply interested in the craft. He came at everything from that perspective rather than another one,' Kurtzel continues. The more you get to know Elordi, the more you find he is truly a student of the game. He's an avid subscriber to the Criterion Channel – a streaming service dedicated to classic and contemporary arthouse cinema – and calls the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman 'the greatest actor of all time'. In addition to reading the novel over and over, Elordi did a lot of digging into the history of film to prep for Narrow Road. In the series, his character is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway, leading him to revisit classics that tread similar terrain. 'There's so much cinema. There's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Bridge Over the River Kwai. There's a lot of great collections on Criterion, too – particularly pre- and post-World War Two Japanese cinema. There's a tonne of poetry and a great book called Behind Bamboo too – it may not be popular media, but this was all really helpful to me,' says Elordi. For Kurtzel, much of filming Narrow Road was about getting out of the way and letting the performances of Elordi and his co-stars dominate. 'We wanted it to feel alive,' says Kurtzel. 'We shot hand-held for very, very long takes, and it was to try to make the actors feel as though they were kings on set, and we were just there to follow them. A lot of the energy of the show came from what they were giving us.' And when Elordi returned to Hollywood afterwards, he did so as a changed man. He deactivated his Instagram in November 2024 with more than 13 million followers – seemingly unthinkable in an era in which social media fame dictates someone's perceived value to film executives – and he's chugging headfirst into the next era of his career. Without the distractions that come with managing his public persona, Elordi is thriving. He'll star as Frankenstein's Monster in Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Hig in Ridley Scott's upcoming The Dog Stars, based on the bestselling novel. 'Now I have the freedom to make them on a regular basis and hopefully make good ones,' says Elordi. 'It's a dream come true.' BeIN Media Group is the rights holder of Narrow Road to the Deep North in the Mena region
