‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ – Review
A sombre and haunting experience awaits those who walk The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In what is easily the most emotionally arresting television event of 2025, visionary Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel adapts Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel into a sweeping, harrowing five-part miniseries that confronts the brutality of war, the transcendence of love, and the agonising passage of memory.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a savagely beautiful five-part series charting the life of Dorrigo Evans (played by Jacob Elordi as a young man, with Ciarán Hinds as the older Dorrigo), through his passionate love affair with Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young), his time held captive in a POW camp, and his later years spent as a revered surgeon and reluctant war hero.
With this adaptation, filmmaker Justin Kurzel continues to cement his legacy as a cinematic craftsman unafraid to explore the hallowed depths of the human experience. Known for his searing portraits of tragedy and psychological complexity (Snowtown, Macbeth, Nitram), Kurzel brings Flanagan’s epic to life with a level of visual intimacy and narrative reverence that feels sacred. What results is not only a bold artistic achievement but a profoundly moving meditation on identity, survival, and the inexorable echoes of the past.
At its core, The Narrow Road to the Deep North chronicles the life of Dorrigo Evans; an esteemed Australian surgeon and World War II veteran whose heart, mind, and soul remain irrevocably shaped by two defining periods in his life: a forbidden love affair during the halcyon days before the war, and the unspeakable trauma he endured as a prisoner-of-war working on the Burma Railway. Told with a nonlinear elegance by Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant, the series unfolds like memory itself. Fluid, disjointed, and achingly honest.
We first meet Dorrigo in his later years, played with gravitas and melancholic depth by the inimitable Ciarán Hinds. Now a figure of respect and renown, Dorrigo bears the quiet torment of a man who has lived through too much, and perhaps loved too deeply. His memories sweep us back in time, where a younger Dorrigo, portrayed with searing vulnerability by Jacob Elordi, begins to piece together the emotional puzzle of his past.
This temporal duality, between the man Dorrigo was and the man he became, forms the heart of the series, and Kurzel handles it with striking precision. Both Elordi and Hinds deliver career-defining performances, their portrayals harmonising across decades to embody a man caught between longing and regret. Elordi in particular stuns, eschewing vanity for an interior performance that shimmers with repression and heartbreak. His Dorrigo is magnetic yet unknowable; an aspiring healer who is forced to watch the men under his care perish, helpless in the face of violence and starvation. His eyes carry the weight of sins he did not commit, and his soul trembles beneath the façade of control. The performance is matched by Hinds, whose Dorrigo is a haunted figure, forever pursued by shadows. In Hinds’ capable hands, Dorrigo becomes a symbol not just of survival, but of the cost that survival demands. The pain that lingers across the years, like the dark smudge of a scar that never fades, is etched into every word, every look, every breath.
But this is also a story of love; a deep, consuming love that refuses to die. Odessa Young plays Amy Mulvaney, the vibrant, free-spirited woman who ignites Dorrigo’s soul during a fleeting summer affair. She is the wife of his uncle, a detail that casts their romance in forbidden hues, but the connection between them transcends social boundaries. Their time together is passionate, reckless, and filled with the electric promise of a life that could have been. Young’s performance is luminous, radiating both sensuality and sadness. She is the embodiment of Dorrigo’s lost innocence, the one path he never got to follow.
Amy is not the only woman whose presence defines Dorrigo’s life. Olivia DeJonge plays Ella, the woman he marries, but never truly loves. Her younger portrayal is juxtaposed with that of Heather Mitchell’s older Ella, a woman who has spent decades beside a man she never fully understood. Mitchell is heart-wrenching in her quiet realisation, portraying a woman who has lived in the periphery of another’s life, all while yearning for connection. Then there is Essie Davis as Lynette, Dorrigo’s late-in-life companion, resulting from a scandalous yet heartfelt affair. Unlike the others, Lynette sees through to the man beneath the myth. Davis brings an earthy tenderness to her role, grounding Dorrigo in a kind of peace he has spent his entire life chasing.
The emotional layers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North are formidable, but Kurzel’s direction ensures that none of it ever becomes overwrought. Instead, he leans into restraint, allowing the performances and visuals to speak volumes. His use of color and cinematography is nothing short of masterful. The “summer of love” sequences glow with warmth; pinks, yellows, and soft blues suffuse the screen with possibility. In stark contrast, the POW sequences are filmed in grimy browns, murky greens, and oppressive mustard tones, evoking the dehumanising filth and claustrophobia of life on the Death Railway. By the time we reach the muted palette of 1989, the collision of past and present has become a visual metaphor, the lingering trauma bleeding into every corner of Dorrigo’s existence.
Kurzel’s collaboration with Shaun Grant is particularly worthy of praise. Their screenplay maintains the novel’s poetic cadence, embracing the complexity of Flanagan’s prose without ever succumbing to indulgence. The nonlinear structure is executed with deftness, each narrative shift revealing new dimensions to the characters and their relationships. Just as Flanagan believed that our lives are shaped by one or two definitive experiences, so too does the series echo this philosophy. Moments are returned to, reexamined, and reframed, reminding us that the past is never static, but always evolving in our memory.
Equally significant is the miniseries’ unflinching depiction of wartime brutality. Kurzel does not glamorise or romanticise the POW experience. Instead, he presents it in raw, harrowing detail: men wasting away from malnutrition, brutal beatings by Japanese guards, desperate surgeries performed without anaesthesia. The camaraderie between the men is the only flicker of hope, and even that is undercut by the looming spectre of death. These scenes are not easy to watch, but they are essential in honouring the ANZAC spirit and the sacrifice of those who endured this chapter of history.
And yet, The Narrow Road to the Deep North never wallows in despair. It finds beauty in the small moments, laughter between friends, the warmth of touch, the memory of a summer kiss. It is a series as much about resilience as it is about ruin, as much about love as it is about loss.
The score, courtesy of composer Jed Kurzel, is orchestrated with elegant minimalism, enhancing the emotional landscape without overpowering it. Long silences are used to devastating effect, forcing the audience to sit with the characters in their grief, in their longing, in their solitude. It is here that Kurzel’s restraint becomes his greatest asset. He trusts the story, the actors, and the audience enough to let the emotions simmer quietly, but thunderously.
Ultimately, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not merely a period drama or a wartime narrative. It is a deeply human story about the lives we live, the loves we lose, and the moments that define us. It is about the scars we carry, and the questions we never find answers to. Justin Kurzel has created something enduring: a piece of art that bleeds truth. This miniseries will not just move you. It will change you. It is a solemn reminder of the cost of survival, the ache of missed chances, and the enduring light of love, even in the darkest of places.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is streaming NOW on Prime Video.
Image: Prime Video
