A double-episode showcase of prestige TV has now become commonplace at film festivals. It’s a bit disconcerting to stop watching two-fifths of the way in, but for those wondering if this dilutes or betrays the great cause of the big screen – well, it was good enough for David Lynch. Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North has now come to Berlin, a big, bold, complicatedly sensual epic of wartime anguish and personal reckoning, adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the Booker prize winning bestseller by Richard Flanagan.
The story operates in three phases: before, during and after the second world war. Jacob Elordi is Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical student about to ship out, engaged to a beautiful woman from a wealthy family – but he has a passionate affair with Amy (Odessa Young), the younger second wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker).
