The North Water

Visceral, barbaric and unrelenting.

While slow to start off with, The North Water develops into a gripping watch as the characters are dealt one misfortune after another.

If it slightly runs out of steam towards the end, The North Water is mostly gripping, exquisitely made, cinematic TV, consolidating writer-director Andrew Haigh as a major talent.

The North Water has a great cast, an expensive boat, a dark and engaging story, and a sinister mood.

The North Water is superb television with just a few caveats – one, it’s not Benidorm. Relentless cruelty doesn’t have to be gratuitous, and at times here the suffering reaches a mystical beauty all its own - but it is nonetheless relentless.

Gripping. ... Joseph (Heart of Darkness) Conrad would approve. [2 - 15 Aug 2021, p.9]

By the strength of its storytelling, the show eventually earns its darkest flourishes; it adds depth and real heft to its vision of the past as a land of monsters. In all, “The North Water” serves as a bracing plunge into inhumanity that’ll stick with you after its running time melts away.

We suspect that the remaining four episodes of the limited series will pick up, as the ship actually fulfills its doomed mission as an insurance claim. But if you want to get a good idea about the main two characters, the first episode does a fine job setting things up.

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.

Haigh’s “The North Water” possesses every psychological and humanist component required to elucidate the nature of good and evil, including all of the shades in between, but wastes too much effort trying to discover profound significance rather than fortifying its lackluster characters.

For those who found The Terror – with its exploration of powerlessness, isolation and good v evil – too much in a time of powerlessness, isolation and overt battles between good and evil, The North Water is a warm bath. It occasionally shows pretensions to something greater.