Jacob Elordi Leads War and Romance in ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’
Picture this: a jungle camp in Southeast Asia during World War II, prisoners battling starvation and cruelty, and one man haunted just as fiercely by memories of forbidden love as he is by the threat of death. That’s what the new BBC and Prime Video series, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, wants us to experience. The first official trailer finally lets us see Jacob Elordi step into the towering role of Dorrigo Evans, a lieutenant colonel whose life is split between the horrors of war and a love affair that won’t let him go.
If you’re familiar with Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, you know it doesn’t flinch from the ugliest truths of war or the tangled choices that keep people alive. The adaptation—arriving April 18 on streaming—spins through the years: we see Dorrigo’s youthful swagger and desperate romance with Amy Mulvaney, played with a dangerous vulnerability by Odessa Young, before the world crashes in and he’s captured as a POW by the Japanese Army.
What makes this series stand out isn’t just the historical pain or the mud-soaked hardships in the jungle. The trailer draws us in with moments of longing, flashbacks to steamy yet doomed evenings with Amy, and the relentless pressure of leading other prisoners through trauma. The burden isn’t only physical—Dorrigo’s sense of responsibility for his men is crushing, and every decision seems to cost a little more of his soul. It’s love and war, endlessly tangled.
Survival, Memory, and Moral Turmoil
The show doesn't shy away from the cost of surviving the impossible. Ciarán Hinds brings a world-weary weight to the older Dorrigo Evans—a respected surgeon, celebrated in peacetime but quietly wrecked by everything he’s seen and done. Those flash-forwards don’t just pad the timeline; they drive home how those events never really ended for him or the people who survived alongside him.
The trailer teases fierce confrontations and stomach-turning choices in the POW camp, tying the theme of moral compromise right to the show’s backbone. Stephen Graham and Damon Herriman appear as key figures in this survival story, playing men thrown together by chaos and tested by suffering.
The Australian director Justin Kurzel, known for his gritty realism in Nitram, leans into both the intimate and the epic—a rain-soaked track through the bush, a gaze between lovers across a crowded room, the howl of a man mourning what he’s lost. All these details suggest the production isn’t just after war spectacle, but an honest look at how trauma shapes every moment of peace we try to reclaim. Flanagan’s words, ‘memory is the only true justice,’ echo in every frame.
With its April debut on BBC iPlayer and Prime Video, The Narrow Road to the Deep North aims to leave a mark far deeper than just another war drama. Expect awards buzz—and expect to hear people talking about Elordi as a leading man who can do much more than just look good in uniform.