{"id":66817,"date":"2025-05-01T22:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/66817\/"},"modified":"2025-05-01T22:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:33:10","slug":"jacob-elordis-latest-is-excruciating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/66817\/","title":{"rendered":"Jacob Elordi\u2019s latest is excruciating."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Amazon Prime Video\u2019s recent World War II miniseries, is traumatizing in multiple ways. One of those ways involves Jacob Elordi, the extremely tall Australian actor whose starring role in this has tricked some of his fans\u2014who want to see him in a romantic historical drama and aren\u2019t pacified by sneak peeks from the set of Wuthering Heights<\/a>\u2014into watching a show that is, to put it lightly, incredibly bleak. \u201cAmazon\u2019s cover image is really misleading,\u201d said a Redditor<\/a>. \u201cI keep seeing posts from Prime with ONLY the romantic scenes,\u201d another said. \u201cPosting TikTok ads with clips of Dorrigo and Amy captioned \u2018bring back men who yearn\u2019 is crazy business and sells a super distorted vision of what the show really is.\u201d Other, wiser fans know their limits: \u201cI saw a DELICIOUS gif of Jacob Elordi\u2019s back from this show on twitter but unfortunately I don\u2019t watch war films,\u201d one such commenter added. (Here is the GIF, and it\u2019s NSFW<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The five-episode series, which is adapted from Richard Flanagan\u2019s 2014 Man Booker\u2013winning novel of the same name<\/a>, is a gorgeous, moody historical show that has been flying under the radar since its April 18 release, even while maintaining very high Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> and Letterboxd<\/a> ratings. (The first two episodes premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, and the show\u2019s director, Elordi\u2019s fellow Aussie Justin Kurzel, comes from film, most recently directing 2024\u2019s well-reviewed The Order; that is to say, this series is ambitious.) Maybe that\u2019s an artifact of the streaming era, when we all just have too much television to watch, or maybe it\u2019s because the story is grim in the extreme, and although it twines a love story with a war story, it\u2019s still quite hard to fit into the \u201cperiod romance\u201d genre, no matter how much Prime Video\u2019s marketing team tries.<\/p>\n

The story follows the life of Dorrigo Evans (played by Elordi, primarily), a twentysomething doctor who has a brief, hot affair with his uncle\u2019s young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), while he\u2019s engaged to another woman, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), then immediately ships out to fight, spending most of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese army in Thailand, the commanding officer of hundreds of miserable, starving men. Afterward, he comes home, marries Ella, and never speaks to Amy again. Flanagan\u2019s father spent three years<\/a> in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, working on the Thai\u2013Burma Railway, a doomed project that cost the lives<\/a> of 90,000 civilians and 16,000 prisoners of war, and the character of Dorrigo is based partially on him and partially on real-life surgeon and officer Edward \u201cWeary\u201d Dunlop<\/a>. Because of this grounding in real life, the publication and the Man Booker\u2013ification of Narrow Road was a huge literary and historical moment<\/a> in Australia; accordingly, the miniseries features many Australian actors and was filmed<\/a> in New South Wales.<\/p>\n

The show has three timelines, with three distinct visual and aural milieus. There\u2019s the seaside, near Adelaide, where Dorrigo visits his uncle\u2019s pub during the time right before he\u2019s shipped out, and carries out his love affair with Amy. These scenes, backed by the sound of rushing waves, have a golden heat to them. You can see the pub\u2019s midcentury lack of air conditioning in the sweat on the actors\u2019 bodies, and in Amy\u2019s desperate gulping-down of a glass of water before her first tryst with Dorrigo. (It\u2019s these scenes, and the chemistry between Elordi and Young, that are inspiring those yearning Elordi TikTok edits.)<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the jungle, loud with nature sounds and constantly dripping wet. There\u2019s an indelible image when Dorrigo, having first arrived with his men at the prisoner-of-war camp, still in a flush of \u201cMaybe we\u2019ll get through, if we keep up our morale\u201d delirium, glimpses a group of emaciated prisoners in rags who\u2019ve been there longer. This is his future: diminishment, hunger, beriberi, lice, ringworm, suppurating ulcers. When you see this group of skeletal men, the contrast between the look of their prisoners\u2019 bodies and the relentless activity of the jungle conveys a deep sense of foreboding. The other jungle-camp scenes\u2014an amputation without anesthesia; a beheading; a protracted beating that\u2019s terrible to watch\u2014are brown and green with foliage and mud, both monotonous and unbelievably upsetting.<\/p>\n

The third timeline, with Ciar\u00e1n Hinds as an older Dorrigo and Heather Mitchell as his long-suffering wife Ella, takes place in Sydney in the 1980s, mostly in this miserable couple\u2019s gorgeous modernist house. Dorrigo, now a surgeon and a public figure, is working on a speech he needs to give at the opening of a gallery show exhibiting the drawings that one of his men did of their time on the railroad. The dominant impression is upper-class, poisonous silence. \u201cThis series gives me anxiety of being in a loveless marriage and not being chosen,\u201d one commenter on TikTok<\/a> said of the show, and although others mocked this user for focusing on the romance rather than the war, it\u2019s true that the ennui of Dorrigo and Ella\u2019s later life is a sad mirror of the trapped, traumatic feeling of the camp. \u201cI don\u2019t think Dorrigo has friends,\u201d Ella says; in one dreamlike visual, he hovers in the air 6 feet over her as they sleep in bed\u2014what\u2019s between them is an impassable separation.<\/p>\n

This is not a typical \u201cMan comes home from war and suffers PTSD\u201d story, however. The novel, which offers far more character development than the miniseries (that\u2019s what novels are good for), poses this possibility: Maybe Dorrigo was never virtuous or good, and his suffering taught him nothing. Flanagan\u2019s novel is, as some Redditors have correctly assessed<\/a>, a classic \u201cgreat book I never want to read again.\u201d It\u2019s not just that the things Dorrigo Evans and his soldiers suffer are awful\u2014way more awful on the page than the screen, by the way; I guess passages like \u201cThe man\u2019s buttocks were little more than wretched cables, out of which his anus protruded like a turkshead of filthy rope\u201d aren\u2019t good candidates for streaming TV adaptation\u2014though they are. It\u2019s also that Dorrigo, as a character, experiences two remarkable things in his life, both in his 20s, then stalls out into meaninglessness.<\/p>\n

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The first of those things is a love that, he thinks at the time, is transcendent, singular, and pure. But it\u2019s also one that\u2019s transgressive, amplified by its forbidden nature and the wartime setting; you wonder whether Dorrigo and Amy\u2019s torrid romance would have mattered this much if the two had met under different circumstances. Then, he\u2019s put in the impossible situation of the POW camp, where he is tested and becomes the leader his men call \u201cBig Fella\u201d but also develops a view of the world that sees all that sorrow, suffering, and heroism as contingent, random, and maybe ultimately pointless. In the novel, Dorrigo dies only partially redeemed; he is, to put it bluntly, kind of an asshole, who lies to himself about how much his self-delusion has hurt his wife and children.<\/p>\n

But Flanagan surrounds Dorrigo\u2019s postwar story with that of other characters who also experience the war and come away with very little greater understanding of life\u2014most memorably, the Japanese officers who ran the POW camp, and who never truly regret it, and the Korean guard most hated by the prisoners, who (we find out) was forced into service by his family\u2019s extreme poverty under Japanese colonial rule. The awful scene at the crux of the novel, which also anchors Episode 4 of the TV adaptation, is this guard\u2019s beating and killing of \u201cDarky\u201d Gardiner (his name is sanitized in the TV series into \u201cFrank\u201d), a likable, young, part-Aboriginal soldier who turns out to have been connected to Dorrigo in an intimate way that he comes to understand only years later.<\/p>\n

You might think these artfully conveyed backstories, connections, or novelistic revelations would make things make sense, but none of them do very much to help the reader escape the story\u2019s dominant sense of gloom. War, the novel argues, is not about redemption, and \u201cheroes\u201d like Dorrigo are just regular people who happened to find that in impossible circumstances, performing their duty made them feel better than giving up. In one memorable passage early in the book, Flanagan speaks directly to the reader: \u201cHorror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.\u201d<\/p>\n

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    This is near impossible to re-create for the screen: Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant, the series\u2019 writer, cannot put Jacob Elordi into a beautiful Amazon Prime production about love and war that leaves people with a \u201cHorror just is\u201d vibe. And so, many big and small tweaks are duly made. Ella is much more likable in the show than in the book, which makes Dorrigo\u2019s choice to stay with her after the war more understandable. Rather than resisting the idea of preserving his soldier\u2019s drawings after his death\u2014because, as novel Dorrigo thinks, \u201ctelling the story\u201d will do nothing\u2014TV Dorrigo smuggles his sketchbook out as a matter of course. And in the final episode, at the gallery opening where people come to see Dorrigo talk about the drawings, he amends the speech he\u2019s written, to make it scan a bit better to people who want some kind of wisdom and resolution. \u201cOur memory is the only true defense against repeating the miseries of history,\u201d he says, and the camera pulls back to show a wide view of the gallery, with the ghosts of the skeletal POWs surrounding him, in a sort of tacit scene of approval and witness. This is exactly the kind of sop to our latter-day sensibilities that the novel\u2019s Dorrigo would disdain.<\/p>\n

    Still: Jacob Elordi is in an Amazon Prime miniseries about a corner of World War II unfamiliar to many Americans. It\u2019s gorgeous, ugly, and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain, and it got me to read a really good novel. At least Kurzel did not give its doomed love story a happy ending, though this must have been tempting. This was a great use of Amazon\u2019s money, and I hope the romance-first watchers recover soon.<\/p>\n

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