The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: a new Australian classic

‘Why at the beginning of things is there always light?’ So opens Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s elegiac, Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Dedicated to his father’s unimaginable suffering as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, forced under despicable conditions to forge the Thai-Burma railway during WWII, the book is mired in mud and blood. But even in the darkest places, light never completely dims. Pure energy, it simply changes form. With time itself captured in this eternal loop, the end is always near the beginning.

A band of gold captured in Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang director Justin Kurzel’s astonishing adaptation.

Penned by regular writing partner Shaun Grant, Prime Video series The Narrow Road to the Deep North harnesses these electromagnetic waves, condensing Flanagan’s weighty tome into an equally incandescent triumph.

Watch The Narrow Road to the Deep North trailer.

Opening on the Syrian campaign in 1941, a hellish glow flickers on the faces of Australian soldiers led by Dorrigo Evans (Saltburn and Priscilla star Jacob Elordi) as the 7^th regiment regroups after an unseen clash with Vichy French forces. There’s First Nations man Frank (The Last Days of the Space Age actor Thomas Weatherall), big lug ‘Tiny’ (David Howell), doe-eyed Rabbit (an achingly emotive William Lodder) and joker Jack Rainbow (Bump lead Christian Byers).

Their ebullient camaraderie after rescuing an orphaned boy is extinguished by the cold grey chill of morn, with the kid and one of their company dead. But whatever hell they face pales into insignificance after their capture by the Japanese forces following 1942’s also unshown Battle of Java. This is a story held close in its intimate moments.

Forced into literal back-breaking work on a diet of starvation, dysentery and malaria in the sweat-inducing choke of the jungle, they wither under the unsparing eyes of Tokyo Vice star Shô Kasamatsu’s Major Nakamura and the lash of Charles Napoleon An’s hulking Korean solider, the Goanna, pressed into Japanese service himself.

Bringing shades to a thorny role, Kasamatsu’s Nakamura is increasingly drawn to Dorrigo’s company, but not enough to agree to the Australian’s increasingly desperate pleas that the health of his men is tied to the success of his mission.

Numbing his doubts in sake and sedatives, Nakamura is pushed into ever-greater malevolence by his fanatical superior, Colonel Kota (Taki Abe). ‘You waste time trying to explain our ideas to prisoners,’ Kota insists. ‘What we do here will be remembered forever.’

The Narrow Road: in the shadows

No easy watch, The Narrow Road to the Deep North nevertheless holds tight to the fading light, with Kurzel and Grant looping time through its glimmer.

Evoking that old Hollywood glamour in his strapping performance, Elordi’s Dorrigo is carried back to the beach in his dreams and a summer of forbidden love in which he falls hard for Amy (an iridescent Odessa Young). Only she’s the wife of his loving publican Uncle Keith (an always welcome Simon Baker), and Dorrigo is already promised to the moneyed Ella (Olivia DeJonge).

But tumble they do, regardless, in the smoky haze of a candlelit club as a spotlight ignites the sequined dress of Chantel Cofie’s dazzling jazz singer.

As lensed by The Stranger cinematographer Sam Chiplin, these day-dreamy sequences dance limberly. While the story is predominantly told from the perspective of these shattered young men, it’s to Young’s great credit that she imbues Amy with a careworn complexity that radiates the bitter reality of their situation.

A moment in the dunes and a thigh caught on barbed wire, sealed with a metallic kiss, are everywhere at once as time folds in on itself again and again.

In another life, now played by Belfast actor Ciarán Hinds, Dorrigo is a successful surgeon working in the 1980s, whose modernist home sits above the tree line, with perhaps too much time spent lingering in pain meted below an unforgiving jungle canopy.

Dorrigo says the only way to wield the knife is to be without emotion, but his waking nightmares, as old wounds bleed through troubled nights, give lie to that fancy.

A man whose bed is made in mess, the uniform of war hero fits awkwardly on Dorrigo, as evinced by a prickly encounter with a young journalist who raises the monstrous spectre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘We were forced to extreme measures,’ he counters, but is he any more convinced of this received truth than Nakamura?

Haunted by reflections of lost boys in the glass of artworks drawn by Rabbit, Dorrigo is both here and not.

The remarkable Heather Mitchell brings great depth to an older Ella, committed to Dorrigo as much as she ever was, even as he cheats with Lynette (The Babadook star Essie Davis, Kurzel’s partner), who is married to his business partner Rick (Dan Wyllie). Broken wings beat ever on.

The Narrow Road: sound and vision

While sound may travel slower than light, the sawn heartstrings score by Jed (brother of Justin) Kurzel appears to race faster. Crafting a lifeline that pushes and pulls us back and forth, his achingly tender composition threads these three distinct timelines together seamlessly.

His work is amplified by Mick Boraso and Andy Wright’s magnetic sound design, with the chirrup of tropical insects intruding in the austere cool of an inner-city gallery, or the wash of the ocean crashing over the slurry of the camp.

Editor Alexandre de Franceschi likewise navigates Kurzel’s impeccably fractured vision gracefully, with Elordi and Hinds astonishing as our through-line in the shared role that underpins it all.

The Narrow Road: no small parts

It’s a credit to The Narrow Road to the Deep North’s scope that, much like the marines of James Cameron’s Aliens, there are no small parts here.

We care deeply about all the soldiers’ fates as death stalks the shadows of their torture – at the bone-severing edge of a samurai sword, the leather crack of a whip or, perhaps most brutally, in the literal shits. As their beaten bodies recall the desolation of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, the ensemble’s grit shines through watering eyes.

Byers, so charmingly dotty in Bump, is effervescent as the playful Rainbow, inhabiting Juliet to Lodder’s Romeo as he and Rabbit try to rouse the group’s spirits with malarkey. There’s bawdy gallows humour, too, in a callback about how Howell’s Tiny got his nickname.

Heartbreak High star Weatherall’s smile works magic in the mayhem that follows Jack and the lads.

Their love for one another staunches the stream of despair, ensuring that Kurzel’s monumental achievement circles back, once more, towards the light in the beginning.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North premieres on Prime Video on 18 April 2025.

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