The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A beautifully shot war drama undermined by its own misplaced focus.

Overview: Burma Railway in 1943 and across the Pacific during World War II, charts the cruelty of war, the tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love, as seen through the eyes of an Australian doctor and prisoner of war.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is Prime Video’s latest five-part prestige series (with episodes around 40 minutes each, totaling about 3.5 hours), based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel. It’s inspired by real events—Flanagan’s own father survived the construction of the Thai-Burma Death Railway during World War II, a Japanese project that forced prisoners of war into labor and ultimately claimed the lives of over 100,000 laborers. With a real-life tragedy at its core, a sizable budget, a notable cast, and cinematic production values, the series checks every box for high-end historical drama. And while it occasionally delivers powerful moments and feels deeply cinematic, it never quite reaches the emotional impact it’s clearly striving for—especially because it shifts its focus away from the most affecting part of the story (the brutal treatment of the POWs) to instead dwell on an overly soapy, clichéd romance.

The story follows Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, played in his youth by Jacob Elordi and later by Ciarán Hinds. Told across three timelines, the series moves between his pre-war affair with his uncle’s wife, his experiences as a prisoner of war under the Japanese—where he’s forced to care for fellow soldiers working on the railway—and his post-war life as a celebrated hero haunted by guilt and a long-lost love. It’s an ambitious structure, but not one the series fully manages to juggle.

Director Justin Kurzel (The Order, Nitram, Macbeth) is no stranger to disturbing material, and the war timeline is where the series is at its most visceral. The jungle scenes are harrowing—soldiers collapsing in mud, enduring brutal punishments, and slowly wasting away. The Japanese officers, themselves under pressure to complete the railway, displace that pressure onto the prisoners with escalating cruelty. Their cultural perspective—that prisoners lack honor and must rebuild it through suffering—is an intriguing dynamic, and the series occasionally explores it with nuance.

Kurzel captures this brutality with textured sound design and cinematography from his frequent collaborator Adam Arkapaw (The King, True Detective), which effectively conveys the density and humidity of the jungle. The oppressive tension of the work camps feels tangible, and these sequences are where the show feels most assured—raw, cinematic, and immediate.

Rather than deepening our understanding of the prisoners and letting us truly connect with two or three of them, the series pivots much of its focus to Dorrigo’s pre-war love affair—intended as his emotional anchor but ultimately less compelling. As a result, the supporting characters among the POWs are pushed to the sidelines and barely developed. The show gestures at deeper bonds—a soldier who sketches to cope, flickers of camaraderie—but they’re too underwritten to register. Attempts at levity fall flat—oddly, the show equates brotherhood with moments like a soldier flashing another or prisoners joking about someone’s erection—and even the more serious exchanges, like when Rabbit explains why he draws, come off as afterthoughts. For a story built on collective suffering, the lack of emotional connection with these men lessens the impact when tragedy inevitably strikes.

Meanwhile, the romantic subplot takes up a disproportionate amount of screen time. Odessa Young delivers a layered performance as Amy—the woman Dorrigo falls in love with, trapped in a marriage she wasn’t ready for—but the scenes themselves are repetitive and far less engaging. Long, artfully lit sex scenes and tired love triangle tropes drag on, slowing the narrative momentum, and there’s something frustrating about how the series chooses to romanticize a relationship built on betrayal.

Once again, Elordi is cast as a quiet, emotionally detached man caught in morally murky territory—quickly becoming a recurring beat in his post-Euphoria filmography (Oh, Canada, Priscilla, On Swift Horses, and now this). This is by far his most demanding role yet, and while he has moments that land—particularly in the war timeline—it’s clear he’s trying. His commitment is evident, physical transformation and all, but his restrained delivery and low energy hold the series back. Once again, we’re reminded of the limits of his range.

Faring slightly better is the post-war timeline. Ciarán Hinds brings real pathos to the older Dorrigo—now a public hero but privately burdened by guilt and memory. Like Anthony Hopkins in One Life, Hinds plays a man struggling to reconcile his legacy with the weight of what he’s lived through. The writing doesn’t always give him enough to work with—especially since so much of his pain is rooted in a romance the show never fully earns, rather than in the soldiers he left behind—but the grounded maturity of these scenes is welcome.

This tonal imbalance is felt throughout the series. The post-war scenes are solemn, the war timeline is brutal, and the romantic subplot feels like it wandered in from another show—at times veering closer to Outlander than Band of Brothers. There’s also a clear effort to appeal to younger viewers, with Elordi’s casting, a steady stream of shirtless scenes, and modesty-blocking that becomes unintentionally comic. Never have starving POWs been so camera-conscious.

There’s a powerful story buried in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but the five episodes spend much of their time focusing on the wrong things. It might have worked better as a focused two-hour film—something sharper, more emotionally concentrated on the war timeline, with the pre-war material trimmed, restructured, or removed altogether. The craftsmanship is undeniable: Jed Kurzel’s haunting score, the immersive production design, and Arkapaw’s textured visuals all contribute to its cinematic feel. But what’s missing is a sense of emotional buildup—something that truly earns the devastation it aims for. The series demands to be taken seriously, but struggles to truly move you.