Review of the series The North Way on Magenta TV – Medien

The world is a cruel place, cold and indifferent to death and suffering. Man has only two options: he can isolate himself and devote himself to the beautiful and spiritual in order to leave suffering behind. Or he can become a part of this world, even cold and indifferent to death and suffering.

These are old questions, old as humanity. Therefore it was both surprising and understandable that the British literary scholar Ian McGuire landed a bestseller a few years ago when he wrote a novel on this archaic subject: “The North Water”, in the German translation “Nordwasser” and for the Booker Prize nominated, tells of violence, of whale hunting and war, of deprivation in the far north and at sea, and what this life does to people. The models were Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. A novel of huge images between the yellow dust of India and the blue ice of the north, which almost demanded a film. It is fortunate that this has now been implemented as a five-part mini-series and not just as a two-hour feature film and that it was actually shot on a real sailing ship off Svalbard for almost a month.

A raw image of man emerges from archaic motifs

Colin Farrell plays the harpooner on the ship featured in the series Volunteer called. Henry Drax is a shaggy monster, cruel and cunning, a whale killer who knows exactly how and where to place his harpoon in order to hit the hearts of the giant animals. In a world of predators, he’s put himself at the top of the food chain. Only: the time of the hunters is up. His profession is doomed. It is the end of the 19th century, the whale oil, with which the cities were once bathed in light at night, is no longer needed, it is being replaced by the more efficient paraffin oil and will be replaced by electricity in the foreseeable future. The whole expedition is therefore a farce, because more money can be made with insurance fraud than with oil. The sailors on board the whalers have long been walking dead, ghosts of themselves, no longer good for anything other than for others to make profit by destroying their bodies. What else separates them from the whales that they hunt and kill?

A man tries to preserve humanity on board this ghost ship, but is also a failed man who does not want to admit his misfortune: Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), field surgeon, dishonorable dismissed for refusing to give orders during combat operations in the Indian colonies, is happy to have found employment on this ship. Doubtfully he watches the bloody craft of the whale hunters as the animals are cut up on board, marveled at the cruel indifference and rawness of the crew. How different is his use of the scalpel. Or? He reads Homer and Swedenborg in the cabin while the glaciers and icebergs slide by in front of the porthole. Self-deception in the face of raw nature, the defense of the useless, or its only salvation?

Hardly at sea is a cabin boy brutally raped and murdered. A case that attracts little attention in this world. The sailor who is said to prefer the company of men is quickly suspected. Only Sumner wants to see that the evidence does not match and that all the evidence points to another murderer, the harpooner Drax. Above the investigation in the eternal ice hangs the question: Can civilization, humanity, justice prevail against the alpha predator in this Darwinian world?

The series is humorless and does not shy away from any bloody wound, it is about death, murder and privation, everything here wants to address something primeval. From these archaic motifs emerges a raw image of the human being, of a human being in contrast to nature, who empathizes and who has something to counter the cruelty and the cold. It is the birth of humanism, and The North Water is a great defense of this ideal.

The North Water, from October 14th. on Magenta TV, five episodes