![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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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