In Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Jacob Elordi delivers a career-defining performance as Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon haunted by the twin specters of wartime brutality and an all-consuming, unconsummated love. Kurzel, known for his visceral explorations of fractured psyches in films like Macbeth and Nitram, crafts a haunting, lyrical meditation on memory, guilt, and the elusive search for meaning in the wake of unimaginable suffering. This is not a war film in the traditional sense—it is a requiem for the selves we lose in love and conflict, rendered with a painter’s eye for beauty amid desolation.
A Fractured Narrative: Love and War as Parallel Trenches
The film unfolds across two timelines, intertwined like scar tissue. In postwar 1950s Sydney, Dorrigo (Elordi) is a celebrated war hero, lauded for his leadership of POWs forced to build the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” under Imperial Japan. Yet his public veneer of stoicism masks a private torment: flashbacks to the camp’s horrors—starvation, disease, executions—merge with memories of a passionate affair with Amy (a luminous Odessa Young), the wife of his uncle. In the film’s present, Dorrigo drifts through life like a ghost, his trauma echoing in empty hotel rooms and the hollow praise of strangers.
Kurzel resists linear storytelling, opting instead for a mosaic of moments that mirror the disorientation of trauma. Scenes of Dorrigo tending to dying soldiers are intercut with fragmented glimpses of his romance with Amy—sun-drenched trysts in coastal cliffs, whispered confessions in rain-soaked gardens. The effect is less a traditional narrative than a sensory immersion into Dorrigo’s psyche, where love and war exist as twin forces of destruction and redemption.
Elordi’s Revelatory Performance: The Weight of Silence
Jacob Elordi, best known for his roles in Euphoria and Saltburn, transcends his heartthrob persona here, delivering a performance of staggering emotional precision. His Dorrigo is a man bifurcated by duty and desire, his physicality telegraphing the burden of survival. In the camp sequences, Elordi’s eyes—often framed in extreme close-up—hold a quiet fury as he negotiates with Japanese officers for medicine and food, his voice a steely calm masking desperation. But it’s in the postwar scenes where his performance deepens into something transcendent.
Watching Elordi navigate Dorrigo’s disintegration is akin to witnessing a statue erode. At a veterans’ gala, he mechanically accepts handshakes, his smile a rictus of pain. In solitary moments, he stares into mirrors as if searching for the man he once was. When a journalist asks him to recount his heroism, Elordi’s face tightens imperceptibly—a micro-expression that conveys lifetimes of unspoken shame. “Heroism is a lie we tell the living,” Dorrigo mutters, a line that lands like a hammer.
Odessa Young: Love as a Lifeline and a Wound
As Amy, Odessa Young embodies the intoxicating allure of a love that exists outside morality. Her chemistry with Elordi is electric, their scenes together charged with a desperate, almost feral intensity. In one standout sequence, Amy and Dorrigo meet clandestinely in a bookstore, their hands brushing over a copy of The Odyssey. Kurzel lenses the moment in golden hues, the camera circling them as if capturing a dance. But this romance is no idyll—it’s a collision of two souls seeking escape from their gilded cages. Amy’s marriage to Dorrigo’s uncle (a chillingly genteel Hugo Weaving) is a prison of polite smiles, while Dorrigo’s engagement to another woman (a tender but underused Isabelle Cornish) feels like a surrender to societal expectation.
Young’s performance is a masterclass in repressed yearning. In a late-film confrontation with Dorrigo, she delivers a monologue about the cost of their affair with such raw vulnerability that the air seems to leave the room. “You were my life,” she says, “and now I’m just a shadow in yours.” It’s a moment that crystallizes the film’s central tragedy: Love, like war, leaves its survivors forever altered.
Kurzel’s Visual Poetry: Beauty as a Counterpoint to Horror
Kurzel and cinematographer Germain McMicking (True Detective, Top of the Lake) craft a visual language that oscillates between the grotesque and the sublime. The Death Railway sequences are shot in desaturated tones, the jungle a claustrophobic tangle of mud and barbed wire. Kurzel lingers on the POWs’ emaciated bodies—ribcages protruding like shipwrecks, eyes sunken into skulls—but juxtaposes these horrors with surreal, almost hallucinatory beauty. A dying soldier’s vision of snow falling in the jungle; a butterfly alighting on a rifle barrel; Dorrigo’s memory of Amy wading into an azure sea—these images serve as fleeting respites from the carnage, reminders of the world’s capacity for wonder even in darkness.
The film’s most audacious sequence unfolds during a Japanese air raid. As bombs rain down, Kurzel slows the action to a dreamlike pace, the screen filled with floating ash and billowing smoke. Dorrigo, clutching a wounded comrade, locks eyes with a young Japanese soldier across the battlefield. For a heartbeat, the chaos stills, and the two men share a look of mutual recognition—a wordless acknowledgment of shared humanity. It’s a moment that encapsulates Kurzel’s thesis: War reduces us to roles, but art can resurrect our stolen selves.
The Ambiguity of Survival: Is Redemption Possible?
The film’s most provocative choice is its refusal to offer catharsis. Dorrigo’s postwar life is a series of masks—loving husband, revered doctor, public intellectual—but none fit. In a searing third-act scene, he visits a former Japanese officer (a haunting Kōji Yakusho) now working as a translator in Tokyo. Their conversation, steeped in unspoken regret, lays bare the futility of seeking absolution. “We are both ghosts,” the officer says. “The difference is, I wear mine on the outside.”
Kurzel leaves us with no easy answers. Dorrigo’s final moments—a wordless sequence of him walking into the ocean, waves crashing over his bowed head—suggest not resolution, but surrender. The camera holds on Elordi’s face as the water rises, his expression flickering between anguish and peace. Is this a suicide? A baptism? Kurzel, ever the provocateur, lets the ambiguity linger.
A Timeless Meditation on the Human Condition
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not a film for those seeking tidy narratives or moral clarity. It is a challenging, often punishing work that demands engagement with its contradictions: How can love coexist with betrayal? Can art redeem unspeakable suffering? Kurzel offers no platitudes, trusting instead in the power of image and performance to evoke truths beyond words.
Jacob Elordi’s portrayal of Dorrigo Evans will undoubtedly dominate awards discourse, but the film’s real triumph lies in its unflinching humanity. By turns brutal and tender, grotesque and sublime, it forces us to confront the uncomfortable paradox of existence: That we are all, in some way, prisoners of our pasts—and yet, within that confinement, there remains the faintest glimmer of grace.
In the end, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is less a story about war than a prayer for those left to navigate its aftermath. As the credits roll, one is left not with answers, but with a profound gratitude for the artists brave enough to sit with the questions.