Amazon Prime’s "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is not a war drama in the conventional sense. It is a quiet, unflinching study of memory, guilt, and the impossibility of reconciling the past with the present. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel and brought to the screen with striking restraint by director Justin Kurzel (whose in the best form of his career), this five-part Australian miniseries is as devastating as it is beautiful.

The story unfolds across three timelines, each a fragment of the fractured soul of Dorrigo Evans. As a young army surgeon (played w...