The Underground Railroad

An epic that’s beautifully and sensitively composed in all aspects, The Underground Railroad is a powerful, often difficult adaptation that prioritises its characters’ personhood, refusing to leave them simply as victims of a thematic point.

It is a masterwork that puts into the spotlight the sheer power and communion that can be found with visual storytelling. This is a series not so much witnessed but felt.

Director Barry Jenkins adapts Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning 2016 novel about slavery and the continuing myth that it's been eradicated into an indelible and indispensable 10-episode masterpiece that raises series TV to the level of art.

The most powerful and devastating depiction of slavery on TV since the groundbreaking Roots, is directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins with a mournful sensitivity that's somehow lyrical as well as brutal. [24 May - 6 Jun 2021, p.8]

The most worthwhile 10 episodes of TV given to us in a long while. ... "The Underground Railroad" is a massive accomplishment and a weighty one, and not to be rushed. Even if you absorb it all at once, parsing its pathways and traveling with it for time seems inevitable, and I suspect we'll be talking about this for a while.

Anything but limited. It’s profoundly expansive and exploratory.

Empathy and closeness radiates from the screen. ... The lead performances from relative newcomers Mbedu and Pierre are transporting. ... Jenkins is renowned for his nuance, subtlety and meditative silences, and those qualities transfer to television, with each episode of the series resembling a short film — beautiful cinematography, carefully considered locations, meticulous sets and wardrobe.

It is harrowing, beautiful, moving, terrifying, and somehow both deeply genuine and poetic at the same time.

Powerfully surrealist. ... While the cast is uniformly excellent, the revelation is Mbedu.

Mbedu – already a star in her native South Africa – is extraordinary, and embedded in an extraordinary adaptation: hallucinatory, magical, allegorical and yet permanently in the pursuit of historical and eternal truths, the resurrection of lost perspectives and the uplifting of unheard voices. Watch it, but slowly, one complex, virtuosic, heartbreaking episode at a time.

The story moves at the director’s pace, and much of this 10-part Amazon series is deliriously, cinematically beautiful despite the context. ... He conjures visual poetry where there should be none, with all the consequent exhilaration that artistic aspiration delivers.

The Underground Railroad made me feel things about my own life and personal pain very deeply, while never letting me forget that while I could relate to aspects of this story, it is not my own. ... The show’s achievement is making every episode feel so full as to allow you to watch an individual installment, walk away for a while feeling like you’ve got a complete story, then return when you’re ready for another story featuring some of the same characters.

Breathtaking. ... Jenkins uses the medium of serialized television to open up its layers, transcending the specifics of place and period. With roughly two minutes of screen time for every page of text, he’s able to reproduce the book’s most resonant monologues but also insert long, wordless, lyrical passages that communicate characters’ inner lives more elegantly and completely than the voiceover narration so many literary adaptations lean on.

Transfixing. ... Yes, you will see atrocities. But you will also see humanity and resistance and love. You will see a stirring, full-feeling, technically and artistically and morally potent work, a visual tour de force worthy of Whitehead’s imaginative one.

This is momentous, rhapsodic film-making that pushes television to places it has never been before. Get on board.

Jenkins’ trademark patience behind the camera builds romance and passion with powerful precision, establishing unique individual identities while fleshing out each subject, no matter how many scenes they get. ... Before the final needle drop, it’s impossible not to feel closer to this world and everyone in it.

The filmmaker brings Whitehead’s alternate history — anchored by a literal underground railroad that clandestinely transports runaway slaves — to vivid and visually stunning life.

The series succeeds in anchoring its narrative to the full context of racism throughout centuries. It compels us to reflect both on what happened and where those events have led us – how they continue to shape us and the world we live in.

By showing the joy and laughter, the love and determination, mixed with the horrors, Jenkins turns historical slaves away from being suffering props for white consumption, and gives them dignity. In Thuso Mbedu’s resolute, sincere turn as Cora, she fills us with an equally unfathomable grace.

Both the novel and series transcend blunt allegory with a haunting magical realism that openly embraces the horrors of slavery in America. Whitehead’s prose is engaging, but Jenkins’ visuals are searing. ... Each installment feels complete and satisfying, which is good because the story’s intensity doesn’t lend itself to binge watching.

The series ratchets up the tension while also moving slowly through the minutiae, and in it is a tale ready to be deemed a classic.

'Underground Railroad' solidifies itself as the kind of adult black-originated drama that is not only needed but we are seeing more of. It is not a Marvel crowd pleaser. It is far from the polished thrills that have made trending topics their master. But it unapologetically never tries to be. And never needs to be.

With “The Underground Railroad,” a compositional achievement—pictorial and psychological—Jenkins has done for the antebellum South what J. M. W. Turner did for the sea.

Underground Railroad is not a perfect adaptation despite how meticulously crafted it is in certain areas. ... Regardless of its imperfections, Jenkins’ vision is still executed in a thoughtful, incisive way that will hopefully serve as a blueprint for more shows and films like it in the future.

It all results in a show that's a challenging, binge-worthy interplay of standalone incidents, look-away unpleasantness that demands full immersion, denied emotional payoffs and unexpected catharsis. It's a tough book to capture, but Jenkins has risen to the occasion.

A dark, gorgeous, slightly flawed but ultimately spectacular adaptation. At many times it is hard to watch, but it's always worth watching.

The final frame of the pilot challenges your notion on how the rest of this journey will go. ... These two slaves are going to be free at some point, but what they will encounter on their way north will create enough tension and empathy to keep viewers’ attention beyond the first episode.

Jenkins has created a journey well worth taking. It's also one whose impact is blunted, finally, by the length of the stops along the way.

It’s Jenkins’s first major project for television, and he plays with the form in ways that don’t always work — the middle sections of this epic sag like a country bridge. But when “Railroad” comes together, it exerts a dramatic force that puts it close to the great narratives of race in America.

The Underground Railroad is an imperfect take on a painful, sprawling subject. But its emotional highs and lows are stronger than anything you are likely to find on TV this year, just as those images are more gorgeous and nightmarish. Don’t look away.

Not everyone will want to devote 10 hours to watching America’s worst instincts come to grisly fruition, no matter how thoughtfully told — which is fair, especially if you’re Black and understand them all too well. But those who join Cora and Jenkins on this exploration may find themselves enveloped in a story about slaves told unlike many others: one which doesn’t shy away from its truth, but which nevertheless has the compassion to make its suffering more three-dimensional than the shock of a scream.

"The Underground Railroad" is often difficult to watch, at times impossible to watch, but at least there's beauty, power, and some first-rate performances, as compensation.

Jenkins excels at a dreamy state of intimacy, but the allegorical setting can turn distancing. ... The better later hours veer into an all-Black community, so utopian it's on a vineyard, where personal dramas turn political. There's suddenly a large supporting cast, which adds a new depth to the dramatic complexity, as different characters struggle against racism and oppression in diametrically opposed ways.

The Underground Railroad is an incredibly tough watch, but it is a deeply poignant and thought-provoking series from one of the most consistent and incredible directors of the 21st century.