It's apparently becoming more and more common for the best streaming platforms to occasionally send a show they have high hopes for to a film festival, so that critics can watch its first couple of episodes early. That's what Amazon did for its recently-released epic The Narrow Road to the Deep North, at the Berlin Film Festival, and it seems like the new series is living up to that arthouse billing.
Starring Jacob Elordi as an Australian soldier in the Second World War who goes through some truly harrowing ordeals, and Ciaran Hinds as his older self looking back on that trauma, the show promises epic but intimate looks at what it's like to go through experiences that would break many people, both in terms of hardship and emotion.
That epic focus means that there are multiple time settings to cope with, and also two distinct phases of this soldier's life – his time in the military, and his time coping with it. However, the focus isn't just on his service, with a lot of time also devoted to his personal life and love affairs.
It's a messy timeline, in fact, with partnerships that break marriages and trust, end acrimoniously, and showcase just how much the experience of being a prisoner of war might have affected him. It looks like the show's landing with extreme critical success to go with all that nuance, too, as its first reviews are incredibly glowing.
In fact, at the time of writing, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is sitting on that most coveted of accolades in the streaming world – a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Does this actually bring in much benefit to Amazon? Arguably not, but it's a great measure of the broad sentiment about a show, and confirms that this is shaping up to be a showcase of its capabilities.
The director of the five-episode series is Aussie Justin Kurzel, who's best-known for a really quite terrific adaptation of Macbeth from back in 2015, and has been in the big chair for some other great movies since. He's always committed to a visual style, and in the case of The Narrow Road to the Deep North it looks like that involves a lot of darkness and dank jungle vibes.
If all of that is up your street, you can stream the show now on Amazon Prime Video to check it out for yourself and judge it against the hype.
