One of the stations is no more than a dark tunnel and a handcar. Jenkins finds a balance by making the railroad physically believable yet at times fantastical. Reading about a literal underground railroad is one thing, but seeing it on screen takes the metaphor one step closer to reality. Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton, in another of his quietly intense performances) is determined to find Cora because he has failed to capture her mother, who disappeared from the plantation when Cora was a girl, an abandonment that left her so haunted and angry she dreams of slashing her mother's throat with a knife. He is one of many characters displaying the range of attitudes among the enslaved, saying, "I won't be bred like cattle". Throughout the series, the scenes of slaves whipped, hanged and burned are all the more effective for being used so judiciously.Įventually Cora flees the plantation with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre).
At the start, Cora, played with great assurance by the South African actress Thuso Mbedu, is surrounded by brutality but accepts her fate. Here Jenkins establishes Cora's world before moving in a more fantastical direction. In the first episode, that unflinching depiction of plantation life might bring to mind Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, but McQueen and Jenkins are very different artists. – Mare of Easttown review: a superb thriller As she does, a flow of poetic images – a tree blazes with fire or stands stark and bare in the landscape – live alongside occasional depictions of slaves whipped and tortured. The main character, Cora, makes several stops on the railroad's route as she runs from enslavement on a Georgia plantation, pursued obsessively by a slavecatcher named Ridgeway.
As in his Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), every image is gracefully composed, shimmering with imagination and compassion.
Jenkins teases out and emphasises both the book's harsh physical realism and its inventions, shaping them in his distinct style.
#Netflix railroad story series
The visible and the invisible, realism and fantasy, meet in this beautiful and searing series from director Barry Jenkins. The real underground railroad, the historical 19th-Century network of people and safe houses that helped slaves escape, becomes a literal, physical trainline carrying people to safety in Colson Whitehead's novel, on which the show is based.
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