‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Is a Brutal but Poetic War Drama

Jacob Elordi stars in the brutalizing five-part Australian mini-series “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” available on Amazon Prime Video. The show is based on the novel by Richard Flanagan and combines a sweetly doomed romance, a layered domestic drama and a harrowing World War II tale.

Elordi is terrific as Dorrigo, a young aspiring doctor heading off to war. Before he is deployed, he has a doting girlfriend, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but he falls hard for his uncle’s young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), and it’s their taboo love that he visits in his mind during the darkest experiences of his life. Dorrigo is one of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers taken prisoner in the jungles of Thailand, where Japanese soldiers starve and torture them, work them to death, behead some, beat others for hours on end.

We also see Dorrigo in the 1980s, now played by Ciaran Hinds; he’s a successful surgeon and a comfortable philanderer. He is haunted and hollowed-out in some ways, of course, but he has a life, a practice, and now a book of a fellow prisoner’s paintings is coming out, and he has been asked to speak about it.

Each episode bounces around in time, and for once, split timelines come as a huge relief. The jungle scenes are agonizing, even by prestige-misery standards, and you, too, long to retreat, with Dorrigo, into sunny memory.

Dorrigo is a poetry buff, and poems are woven into the whole show, as are painting and music, these expressions of humanity that surface during circumstances both mundane and depraved. A jolly woman plays tunes in bar; a skeletal soldier sings “The Prisoner’s Song” as he lies among his dysentery-stricken companions. The show depicts a dizzying variety of suffering, but it is also generous with its pity. There’s a visceral quality to most scenes — the clammy humidity, the golden warmth of a sandy beach, the icy sterility of a gray office — 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.

“Narrow” is patient, but it isn’t slow. It is also sometimes so illegibly dark that I resorted to turning on the audio descriptions.