An overlooked new project by Briton Endu Hay ("45 Years") starring Colin Farrell as a ruthless assassin harpooner.
1859 Surgeon Patrick Sumner (Jack O'Connell), expelled in disgrace from the British army, asks to take him as a medic on the whaling ship "Volunteer" to Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham), who plans to break the ship on the glaciers for insurance and flood it. There are enough dubious guys on board and without him - what is only the harpooner Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), a bear-like and immoral hero who acts exclusively for the sake of instinct, drinks a lot and seems to constantly think about either murder or sex. While everyone is wondering why Patrick Sumner, a man with such a brilliant past, ended up in the company of garbage, Sumner himself spends stocks of morphine and recalls his service in India.
It would seem a common thing: among dozens of new series there is always one that seems to be devoid of audience interest and deserves much more attention. Another thing is surprising here - such an underestimated project turned out to be a mini-series, which on paper looks like a 100% hit. Northern Waters is the author's project of Andrew Hay, one of the main British directors of the last decade, who single-handedly wrote and directed all five episodes; Jack O'Connell (Bell to Bell, Unbroken) starring Colin Farrell, who needs no introduction and Stephen Graham, who is always in the background, but very talented; finally, one of the main electronic engineers of our time, Tim Hecker, wrote a soundtrack for the mini-series. In a word, wherever you poke, you will get into a star. If it were a full-length film, it would have been considered one of the favorites of the awards season only because of its names, but in the format of the mini-series Northern Waters, it was quietly passed not only in Russia, but also in the United States. The reasons for this bad luck can only be guessed at.
In the comedy series Parks and Recreation, the harsh and metaphor-hating Ron Swanson claimed to be in love with Herman Melville's Moby Dick: kind of like a story devoid of silly symbolism about a man who hates an animal. In the same vein, Northern Waters is just a story about a man who hates ... a man. On the one hand, Sumner is a somewhat traumatized and hiding surgeon, a principled person, reasoning and endowed with a moral core. On the other - Drax, who is not used to thinking about his actions and personifying all the animal and instinctive that is in a person. Their long-standing conflict is not a typical story of good and evil, but a more complex meditation on masculinity, belief in God, class and capitalism, which does not offer the viewer a single unambiguous idea on the selected topics. This ambiguity and ambiguity, coupled with a controversial open ending, is likely to confuse the waiting viewer with clarity or articulated thoughts, although he can always non-ironically view Northern Waters as the very story of human hatred and the nature of evil.
"Northern Waters" is not the best project for binge-watching: there are only five hour-long episodes, but they are so packed with events that they quickly exhaust when watching, but at the same time do not tire at all. It starts like a regular historical series, then goes somewhere in the direction of a personal tragedy, a confusing detective story, a survival drama and a tense thriller, so after watching it it is interesting to mentally return to the starting point and wonder how many events and genres fit in these five hours ... Even if we have seen all this separately, here the combination of familiar particulars gives a noteworthy result: even if you start watching Northern Waters for the sake of familiar actors, after the final credits you will remember the series because of the oppressive atmosphere, existential horror and total injustice of what is happening.
This article was sponsored by STEVE SPECTOR
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