The North Water pits a doctor against a sociopathic harpooner on board an ill-fated whaling ship as it journeys into the heart of the Arctic in this grim adaptation of Ian McGuire's 2018 novel.



Helmed by Andrew Haigh (HBO's Looking) and premiered on AMC+ (Breaking Bad, The Terror), the show begins its journey in 1859 with a whaling vessel, Volunteer, staffing up for a voyage deep into the icy landscape bordering Canada and Greenland. On the surface, the expedition led by Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham) are in the dying business of hunting whales for blubber and seals for pelts. But, known to a select few with ulterior motives, the ship is headed into waters it’s destined never to return from. The crew of the Volunteer is a collection of coarse sailors reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island characters, who are literally and metaphorically looking to escape the rigid existence of life on land and its boring social norms. 

On board, cocooned in its own version of human decency, the Volunteer is reminiscent of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and as the vessel progresses, it becomes readily apparent that a conceptual angle to the story (borrowed from various literary and visual works of art) rises eerily from below decks and spills over the exhibition of coarseness and brutality on display by the sailors, in particular Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), and into the bleak landscape overboard.


The protagonist (?), Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connor) is an ex-British Army surgeon on the run from his experiences in India. His past haunts him and he drowns his memories with bottles of laudunum. Through him, the show waxes philosophical on existentialist tropes ranging from the human condition to the concept of words. Isolating himself for the most part below deck, Dr. Sumner confides in his diary, dissecting with stoicness the intricate and violent links between him and his fellow men and between the men and their unforgiving 18th century existence. 

The ship's first mate, Cavendish, insists that the doctor spend more time aft, drinking and frolicking with the mates. Instead, the doctor takes a liking to Otto, a random sailor who indulges him in his preferred stoicist conversations with increasing frequency as death draws nearer towards the finale and the show begins to flounder. 


The antagonist (?), Henry Drax is as rabid as brutes come. An unrepentant killer and rapist, Dr. Sumner describes him as "the devil in the flesh". Drax is said to be a man of few words but he ends up talking more than anyone else on the show. Yet, beyond that, The North Water might be pointing instead to sheer necessity, or the elements as the true antagonist of the show. Or even more cleverly, that there is no hero or villain in this cold world. Death abounds. The balaclava-ed sailors march across the ice in a breathtaking scene, shooting seals execution-style. 

The resultant screams are spine-chilling. They ambush giant whales, bask in the spray of blood and laugh at the death throes. There’s even an audacious attempt on the life of Dr. Sumner by Drax who breaks the ice behind the former in a bid to make him freeze to death.

The portrayal of this brutality soon gives way to the exposition of the Volunteer and its ill-fated crew as minuscule pieces entering a terrain that is at once familiar and vast beyond their inkling. It is a threefold representation of the existentialist confrontations of man vs. man vs. nature.


Pitted against the ubiquitous indifference of nature, the crew falls apart and the plot follows suit as well. Though a bold and admirable attempt, the capturing of the brutality on display proved to be a double-edged sword for those at the helm of The North Water.

The show, anchored on spectacular set-pieces and jaw-dropping visuals of barren ice and frozen landscapes to impress on us the sparseness of the natural environs, is set against the colliding secret ambitions and motives of the Volunteer’s crew members. But for all these, there’s also a sparseness to the plot as it plays out. This leaves one unsure about whether in general, North Water is an expose on the ripple effects of the declining British Empire, or if its dedicated to exploring the existential conditions which fostered the viciousness of the sailors towards the animals vis-à-vis the viciousness inflicted amongst themselves.


The five episodes of North Water ultimately feel a bit too short or radically long depending on the viewer. It could’ve made a two or three-hour nautical epic or a ten-episode series fleshing out the truncated back stories of the characters to give them more vibrancy instead of making them feel like the ghosts of old sailormen stories. 

By the time Dr. Sumner ends up fighting and defeating an adult polar bear (yup, that’s right. And with a dagger too, à la Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.) we are left scratching our heads and wondering “from where to where?”. If the good doctor spent his time in India hunting elephants single-handedly as an apex killer, it’s never hinted at. The manifestation of elemental evil, Henry Drax, also vanishes after needlessly murdering two natives of the area and leaves us with an unsatisfying, abrupt climax. 


Ultimately though, as the Volunteer sinks, The North Water stays afloat on brilliant acting performances, excellent directing and a well-executed score which combine to make us aware that we’re watching TV unlike any that has been produced, and by extension winning admiration for its painstaking attempt to bring such a difficult genre to life in as brief a time as possible. In all, The North Water is an immersive plunge into the cold depths of brutal inhumanity and frozen indifference which linger in the memory long after the last scene has melted away. 

First-rate TV. 8/10.