Andrew Haigh of “Looking” makes an Arctic adventure, filmed above Svalbard and featuring Colin Farrell as a frightening harpoonist.
The talented British writer and director Andrew Haigh doesn’t like to be pinned down. His last three films, all excellent, have been all over the place: a domestic drama with an element of mystery about an aging British couple (“45 Years”); a rueful gay-friendship tale set in San Francisco (“Looking: The Movie”); and a heartbreaking, violent coming-of-age story about a boy and a horse in the American West (“Lean on Pete”).
If they have a common theme, it’s about people being tested, coming up against their limits. In his intelligent, beautifully filmed mini-series “The North Water” (five episodes, beginning Thursday on AMC+), Haigh takes that idea to new extremes and once again sets out for new narrative territory. Loosely adapted from a celebrated novel of the same name by Ian McGuire, “The North Water” is a 19th-century Arctic adventure, complete with creaking ice, implacable storms, mystical polar bears and seal clubbing.
It is also, as this sort of adventure tends to be, a parable, with strong family ties to the work of Joseph Conrad and Werner Herzog. Haigh’s protagonists — Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), ship’s surgeon on the whaler Volunteer, and Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), its master harpoonist — represent civilization and savagery, respectively. And as the Volunteer sails past Greenland, they circle each other against a backdrop of shipboard rape and murder and a conspiracy to commit potentially deadly insurance fraud. The real evils, to a greater extent than in the book, are capitalism and empire, as Sumner eventually finds that a British shipping office holds even greater dangers than the Arctic.
Haigh, who wrote and directed the entire series, presents Sumner and Drax — and by extension, social norms and feral brutality — as two sides of a coin. Sumner, who is addicted to laudanum and has flashbacks to harsh events during his military service in India, is able to do barbarous things to survive. The casually homicidal Drax, meanwhile, has a baseline chivalry and a gruff seductiveness that are made wholly convincing by Farrell. His murders, awful affairs committed by hand, have an apologetic, almost gentle quality. (When Drax drops out of the story for a stretch in the fourth and fifth episodes, you miss him.)
Haigh’s gift is for seriousness, and for a careful, credible realism that gives his work a richness no matter how quiet or seemingly straightforward the action may be. In “The North Water,” he and the Canadian cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc, filming in authentically extreme locations north of the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway, capture awesome vistas of small wooden boats moving through checkerboard squares of ice. But Haigh and Bolduc are just as good with the fire- and lantern-lit confines of ship and camp. The extremity of the narrative also allows for the occasional expressionist touch, as in a hallucinatory scene in which Sumner trails a polar bear through the fog.
“The North Water” takes place in an almost entirely male milieu, and Haigh, whose gay-themed work has included “Looking” (the movie and the HBO series), the feature “Weekend” and the documentary “Greek Pete,” gives the series a distinct but ambiguous sexual charge. Apart from the violence of the rape story line, the life of the whalers — seen dancing after a successful hunt or clownishly playing as the waves toss the ship — has an intimacy that might be homoerotic or might be an elevated, emotional camaraderie; it doesn’t really matter which it is, and the characters themselves might not know or care.
O’Connell and Farrell are both fine, and the excellent cast includes Stephen Graham as the ship’s captain and, in a small but assured performance, Tom Courtenay as its owner. No one overdoes it, even when the action gets baroque, and their restraint is matched by Haigh’s. He does not indulge in melodrama or audience pandering (with the exception, perhaps, of the series’s last few minutes), and that is so exceedingly rare even in today’s world of prestige TV that you feel the absence almost physically. Unlike just about any other show that makes the claim, “The North Water” really does feel like a five-hour movie.
And as such, it is, perhaps, a little longer and a little more restrained than it needed to be. Haigh’s ideas about society and human nature are legible and convincing, and his adventure tale is, moment by moment, plausible and engrossing. The two sides don’t quite come together with the force you’d like them to have, however — especially at its conclusion, “The North Water” feels like a story you’ve read before.
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Review: In ‘The North Water,’ There’s Blood on the Ice - The New York Times
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