The North Water: TV Series Review (NO Spoilers)

If you love the relentlessly bleak, gray and grim, this is the icebound series for you.

The North Water, a limited series of five episodes currently available on AMC+, is a rather nasty deep dive into the darker side of the human condition. You’ll realize what you’re in for by two minutes into the first episode, “Behold the Man.” Glance through the titles of the remaining 4 episodes (“We Men are Wretched Things,” “Homo Homini Lupus,”* “The Devils of the Earth,” “To Live is to Suffer”) and the brutal theme of the story becomes clear.

Despite the ever-looming grimdark, The North Water is shot and crafted with profound atmosphere, its harsh narrative supported by engaging performances from bearded and dirty characters including Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), Henry Drax (Colin Farrell) and Stephen Graham (Captain Brownlee). This is a male story, set as it in the 1859 environs of port Hull and whaling ships; female characters are rarely seen and those are primarily prostitutes, maids or Inuit. You will glimpse Eliza Butterworth playing the part of Hester in the first episode, strangely far away from her meaty role as Queen Aelswith in The Last Kingdom.

The character of Patrick Sumner is a former British Army surgeon with a traumatic past and disgraced social status who has inexplicably signed up as ship’s surgeon aboard Captain Brownlee’s whaling vessel, The Volunteer. Sumner has taken the low-class job in an attempt to escape the demons of his past but he ends up in close contact with a demon in human form, namely the brutish and amoral harpooner, Henry Drax. Their journey together into the unforgiving arctic seas predictably descends into a wretched trek through the worst both man and nature can conjure into reality.

If you’ve seen the first season of AMC’s The Terror or F/X’s Taboo, you’ll find many similarities in terms of Victorian era look and scenery. It’s all about the men versus madness, the ice and each other. As long as you don’t mind the explicit roughness of the visuals and the constant showcasing of human suffering, The North Sea is a hard-eyed look at a world stricken by failures of manhood and morality. You have to overlook Farrell’s scenery-chewing, borderline-cartoonish (but fun to watch) portrayal of the brutish Drax but the story holds up and the ending fits the piece.

*(The Latin Homo homini lupus translates as “A man is a wolf to another man.”)

SERIES RATING: 7.9 out of 10

If you enjoyed this review please consider becoming a free or paying subscriber to my Substack newsletter and join our community. For the monthly price of one cup of decent coffee you become my patron with early access to my novels, the Writer’s Kitchen podcast and much more insider stuff.