When medical officer Dorrigo (Jacob Elordi) licks blood from a wound off the internal thigh belonging to Amy (Odessa Younger), who can be his uncle’s spouse, it’s a bracing, viscerally erotic second that captures the general vibes of Justin Kurzel‘s miniseries “The Slim Highway to the Deep North.”
The extraordinary first two episodes of the Australian filmmaker’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 novel screened on the Berlin Movie Pageant, introducing us to Dorrigo (performed by Elordi throughout World Conflict II and Ciarán Hinds in 1989) and the haunted reminiscences of his affair with Amy again in rural Adelaide earlier than being shipped off to battle. Director Kurzel has made the male legal psyche his signature inquiry, from final yr’s “The Order” to 2021 Cannes winner “Nitram,” all primarily based on true crime occasions. In “The Slim Highway,” he locks into his most sensuous, atmospheric, and brutally violent research but, this time burrowing into a good man who turns into spiritually corrupted by conflict instances and an addictive romance.
Director of pictures Sam Chiplin and composer Jed Kurzel obtain a gorgeously moody imaginative and prescient of the Australian southern coast, or the Far East of 1943, the place Dorrigo and his cavalry turn into Japanese prisoners of conflict, compelled into laborious, body-and-soul-killing development on the Thailand-Burma Railway deep within the jungle. Meals, water, and humanity are scarce, with Justin Kurzel constructing horrifically stunning tableaux of starved male our bodies writhing in torpor as they’re denied even a day’s relaxation on their activity. Elordi dropped appreciable weight to play Dorrigo at his lowest. He provides the form of brooding, Brando-esque efficiency he’s turn into recognized for, neatly eschewing extra comfy studio roles to as an alternative search daring alternatives that solely construct upon what’s turn into among the finest rising resumes on the town.
Odessa Younger, in the meantime, acclaimed for intense turns as girls in erotic frenzy and freefall in movies like “Mothering Sunday” and “Shirley,” imbues deeply felt heartache into what may’ve been a mere elusive love-object character. We’ve solely seen the primary two episodes, however the actors share a screen-scorching chemistry that threatens to overwhelm Dorrigo and Amy in presumably much more harmful methods in what’s to come back.
When Dorrigo and Amy cross paths by probability at a bookstore throughout early days of acquaintance, she shares her favourite poem with him, which consists of solely three phrases: “You burn me.” Oh, how prescient these phrases might be. That’s to say that “Slim Highway” can be blazingly sexually charged; how uncommon for a narrative of prisoners of conflict, whose our bodies are degraded to factors harrowingly far-removed from something that may very well be justified as erotic.
The primary episode opens in a conflict zone in Syria, 1941, the place the adrenaline rush of the battlefield sinks its horrible claws into Dorrigo, the rookie medical officer, who’s unable to save lots of a small boy or one other soldier whose physique is blown aside by a landmine. All through the premiere, Kurzel and editor Alexandre de Franceschi fling us non-linearly anyplace from 1989 Australia to 1943 Thailand, the place Dorrigo and his fellow military males are packed like cattle right into a prepare carting them off to the following terrible cease on their conflict journey.
In the meantime, again in 1940 Melbourne, Dorrigo seems very a lot in love with Ella (Olivia DeJonge), promising her marriage when he returns from conflict. However that’s thrown off-course by his encounters with Amy, the a lot youthful spouse of his uncle Keith (a sun-tanned, grizzled Simon Baker), who’s blindingly unaware of the sexual vitality radiating between his nephew and partner.
That erotic spark is matched in depth by the vivid pictures of conflict Kurzel conjures within the sequence’ extra brutal stretch within the jungle, the place Dorrigo varieties a closeness with fellow line companions Frank Gardiner (David Weatherall) and Tiny Middleton (David Howell). Scribe Shaun Grant, who’s written a number of scripts for Kurzel together with “Nitram” and the equally men-at-battle-charged “True Historical past of the Kelly Gang,” takes particular care in carving particulars of the customarily raunchy male friendships (suppose a dissipated frat home however with sick, ravenous males wagging their dicks round to cross the time as an alternative of jocks) forming within the jungle.
Even the Faustian relationship Dorrigo seems to be forming with the harmful, katani-wielding Colonel Kota (Taki Abe) implies we might be seeing far more of the Japanese infantry within the episodes to come back. Grant and Kurzel depart no character unfleshed right here in simply two temporary 45-minute episodes.
Even for a present directed by a straight man (Kurzel is married to Essie Davis, who within the 1989 segments performs a colleague’s spouse the grownup Dorrigo is having an affair with), “Slim Highway” takes no disgrace in capturing the tall, lanky, chiseled Elordi’s bodily magnificence, the actor subsequent to stark-naked in a few scenes. The truth is, I’d say “Slim Highway” is extra homoerotic than the opposite manner round, by no means sexualizing the feminine actors, which can be in step with Kurzel’s method to “True Historical past of the Kelly Gang,” the place George MacKay and Nicholas Hoult had been often both undressed or cross-dressing. The director’s curiosity is at all times in masculinity, and so after all, that should and may embody male sexuality, right here to riveting and evocative impact.
It’s the chilling scenes of cholera and jungle-induced illness that stick within the thoughts, too, with an environment recalling the grimmest of conflict film classics. “Slim Highway” sometimes overemphasizes the carnage, like an prolonged close-up of Hinds’ Dorrigo going rogue in surgical procedure on a affected person whereas extracting a tumor off a liver. However the selection could make for an exciting distinction to the eroticism on show: It is a world of blood and viscera, physique fluids, and entrails, and Kurzel goes to point out you all of it. And with an excellent forged of actors, you’ll wish to maintain going the place this highway guarantees to take you.
Grade: A-
“The Slim Highway to the Deep North” premiered on the 2025 Berlin Movie Pageant. Amazon Prime Video will distribute the sequence in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with Sony Footage presently in search of a U.S. distributor.