The Narrow Road: a demanding fresco, but so powerful (review)

A young Australian army doctor, prisoner in a Japanese camp during the Second World War, clings to the memory of his forbidden passion with his Uncle’s young wife. An impressive mini-series, to discover on Canal +.

Jacob Elordi is more and more impressive. Revelation of Euphoria, sulphurous star of Saltburn and tipped to become the future James Bond, he arrives this evening on Canal+ at the top of his art in The Narrow Road, powerful adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s epic novel, The Narrow Road to the Far North (published in 2013). In this war fresco as sumptuous as it is cruel, the young Australian actor undoubtedly delivers his most moving performance to date.

He plays young Dorrigo Evans, an army doctor whose brief forbidden affair with his uncle’s voluptuous young wife will haunt him even in the hell of a prison camp. In the middle of the Second World War, Dorrigo was deported with his comrades to the railway line between Thailand and Burma, forced to work to the point of exhaustion in the middle of the jungle. Everyone does what they can to hold on. Dorrigo, for his part, clings to the memory of his feverish passion… more than to his pretty fiancée from a good family who is also waiting for him.

The Narrow Road is not an easy series. But she deserves to hang on. If only to see that Jacob Elordi is indeed one of the great talents of tomorrow. Its long, filiform silhouette haunts the different paintings of this visceral fresco, which explores both the suffering of the body and the torments of the mind, the heart, the world and war.

Divided into three scenes – his forbidden love, his ordeal as a prisoner, his end of life as an arrogant old doctor – the story is both fragmented and fluid, capable of unfolding its thorny tragedy over three temporalities in just five relatively short episodes (40 minutes). A real tour de force, enhanced by the sensory staging of Justin Kurzel (talented director whose career almost crashed with the terrible adaptation of Assassin’s Creed in 2016).

An atypical and deeply poetic war series, The Narrow Road assumes a certain darkness and a moral complexity that refuses to make a hero out of its prisoner doctor. It also opens a window onto a rarely explored facet of the Second World War, by recounting in detail the terrible daily life of these prisoners of war, brutalized by the Japanese army. Certain sequences are almost unbearably violent, but they help to give The Narrow Road its exceptional dramatic power. Without a doubt a remarkable series.

The Narrow Road, 5 episodes to watch on Canal + on Thursdays October 9 and 16.