The Narrow Road to the Deep North

My Spanish grandmother was under house arrest during the Japanese occupation of British North Borneo during the war. She told me stories of the treatment of Australian soldiers held captive. This show is serious television. It is part English Patient, Tree of Life, Thin Red Line, and Bridge over River Kwai. It is haunting, erotic, intimate, brutal, humanistic, and historical. This was a show made to honor the fallen and to preserve memories and experiences and is unflinching. It is the kind of series that will penetrate your dreams, make you feel small, and humble you. These kinds of series are not often made. The showrunners are owed gratitude and respect for having pursued this undertaking. It is unabridgedly effective.

This miniseries just creeps up on you. The love entanglements and pre war backstory can be a bit confusing; Then episode 4 drops on you, and you are just blown away.

This should be one of those success stories of a little known, under marketed miniseries that came out of nowhere. But the right people take notice and it spreads like the virus it deserves to be.

It is a story about how humans can treat each other, and how the lead characters traumatic experience haunts him later in life despite his clearly major success. While it's fictional I'm sure the atrocities are based on fact. Episode 4 is truly harrowing. If you enjoyed the Pacific or Band of Brothers for its exposure of the inhumanity and futility of war - this will be a real treat.

It's haunting and makes you think. It sticks in your mind. My hope is that in 6 months from now people will be raving about this and it will garner the awards and recognition it deserves.

Yes, this series suffered from a lack of lighting and nonlinear storyline, but for me these served to exentuate the enderlying tones of this dark story.

To those seeking entertainment, I cannot recommend this series. Knowing that it's grounded in actual events it was a painful experience to watch this pretty much from beginning to end. The cruelty, the suffering. No attempts were made here to sugar coat brutal realities or wrap them up nicely with a classic hollywood happy ending. But it is precisely this that made it so compelling and important tp watch.

I also appreciated that the main characters weren't wholly good or bad, but complex - as often is the case in life.

Bottomline: not for the fainthearted, and have a box of tissue nearby.

You can rarely see a good series or movie from the australian perspective. It's a short series but keeps you engaged at almost every scene. The brutality of the japanese or the POW struggling for survival really comes through the screen on an emotional level.

I would say it's a unique World War 2 series, can't put it in a category. It's not really about the war but how we humans sometimes lack the humanity, emphaty or the communication so we could understand each other. When we can't communicate or express ourselves then we just move on instead repairing the thing that brings us the most joy or even who brings us the most love.

A must watch for anyone who enjoys war series with less action and more emphasis on the emotional and personal struggles for both the character and You, the viewer.

Had high expectations, but was very disappointed. The misty, murky photography made it hard to watch and I gave up. The lead actor mumbles his way through the episodes and Ciarin Hind's Aussie accent is even worse, and he too mumbles. The producer should have hired someone who knew how Aussies spoke in 1941, because they certainly did not call a dinner jacket , a tuxedo, nor say hi in a formal setting. I know the series is based on a book, which I have not read, but the movie, Bridge on the River Kwai was better and if you want to know about the hardships suffered by Aussies in Japanese POW camps, read about Sir Weary Dunlop.