At heart, it’s an escape story Cora and her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre) flee a Georgia cotton plantation whose owner has a taste for grotesque punishments. Jenkins’s series sets its terms in the first episode. You will see a stirring, full-feeling, technically and artistically and morally potent work, a visual tour de force worthy of Whitehead’s imaginative one. But you will also see humanity and resistance and love. If you choose to watch “The Underground Railroad,” whose roughly 10 hours arrive Friday on Amazon Prime Video, yes, you will see atrocities. Who does need to see this? Who can bear to? Jenkins (“Moonlight”) has said that this sort of question gave him pause in deciding whether to make the series.īut make it he did. But it recalls a recurring issue raised by other depictions of violent oppression, from the racial horror stories of “Lovecraft Country” and “Them” to the endless replaying of George Floyd’s murder. In the novel, the line is, “I wanted you to see this.” It’s a tiny change, and I don’t know how intentional it is. Along the road they’re traveling, grimly called “The Freedom Trail,” the trees are hung with lynched corpses. In Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” Martin (Damon Herriman), a white man smuggling Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as she escapes slavery, rouses her before dawn to witness something ghastly.
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