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By Christina NewlandFeatures correspondent

A period drama like no other, this gut-wrenching show about a doomed voyage in the Arctic flew under the radar last year. Christina Newland explains why it deserves belated attention.

A five-part miniseries set in the 19th Century – with episode titles like We Men Are Wretched Things and To Live is to Suffer – might be what you would call a 'hard sell' for audiences these days. In a world awash with streaming content, and where escapism never seemed more appealing, it's easy to see how The North Water flew under the radar when it premiered last year, on AMC's streaming service AMC+ in the United States and on the BBC in the UK. It's a prickly endeavour, after all.

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Writer-director Andrew Haigh, known best for articulate independent dramas like Weekend (2011) and the lauded 45 Years (2015), has pursued a brisk change of pace with his adaptation of Ian McGuire's 2016 novel. The North Water features sexual violence and animal cruelty among its myriad other horrors. As Haigh tells BBC Culture: "We knew from the start it wouldn’t be for everyone."

But the surface roughness of this bleakly beautiful series belies a courageous intelligence that means if there's any show from 2021 that deserves some belated attention, it's this one. It focuses on the hardscrabble struggles of working men circa-1859 on a whaling ship setting out for the far reaches of the Arctic. And systematically, over the course of its five episodes, it casts off the assumptions of an audience who may expect it to be a simple tale of macho survival in an Arctic wasteland (not quite) or a more genteel period drama that happens to be set on a ship (definitely not). It's the rare piece of televisual art that is not afraid to risk scaring off an audience. But if you're hardy enough to reach the finale, its rewards are rich.

The force-of-nature acting

Jack O'Connell, the firecracker leading man, began working in his youth on Skinsand moved on to front brilliant British-led films like prison flick Starred Up (2013) and Belfast-set '71 (2014), both deeply embodied physical performances. Here he stars as Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon of Irish origin who has been booted out for mysterious reasons. Sumner seems to be a man of reason and civility, but he's nursing a laudanum habit –19th-Century opium – and a dark past in colonial India, glimpsed in flashback. Sumner signs on to board the whaling ship as its doctor, captained by a shifty veteran of the sea (Stephen Graham, always captivating) who, it turns out, has ulterior motives for their journey.

Among the rough-and-ready crew, whose tough lives are spent clubbing seals, harpooning whales, and trying to fend off frostbite, scurvy, and shipwreck, there's one man who stands out as the most dangerous of the bunch: Henry Drax (Colin Farrell). Each of the three lead actors are forces of nature in their own right, and they perform with a brittle brilliance. O'Connell in particular is phenomenal as a man desperately tussling to seem in control, even as he is increasingly out of his depth. His rascally quality is used to his strength here; in spite of his restrained, learned character, there's a touch of scrappiness beneath which suits the wild backstory of Sumner's army days.

"To want to tell an addict's story was interesting to me. To be hopelessly dependent on a substance is a hell-on-earth type of situation," O'Connell says, speaking on a group video call with Haigh. "So to consider that, in an area that I obviously have no experience of, was very exciting. And to put that in the centre of that piece, it gives you this opportunity to welcome an audience in."

As the ship moves further north, things begin to deteriorate between the men onboard, with a tangle of mercenary impulses, violence, and suspicion compounded by bad luck. And again, the series does all of the things that audiences may look askance at: it is unabashedly slow-burn, seeming like it could be a companion piece to AMC's other period, ship-bound series The Terror minus the supernatural, or a survivalist thriller in the style of The Revenant, or a whodunit in the confined space of a ship at sea – until it isn't any of those things at all. Instead, it is more profound than that: a meditation on the link between masculinity and empire, the poison of colonialist thinking and its cruelty to the environment around us.

"I always wanted the audience to feel, I guess, at sea," Haigh says. "So they were never quite sure what this was going to become or what it was. I also think that, you know, to put it bluntly, [what sets it apart is] it's not about a lot of posh people on a ship, or in a big house. Whalers were working-class men." (And as such, there's some sly commentary in the show about who gets their hands dirty while rich women wear fancy perfume reaped from the slaughter of sea life.)

The authentically testing shoot

The fact that it was partly filmed in the Arctic Circle – and on a ship where much of the cast and crew lived in cramped quarters together throughout a three-week shoot – inevitably heightened the authenticity for those involved. The frostbitten, harried faces of the cast were true to life: some of The North Water was made in the Northernmost reaches of the world that had ever been home to a film crew. "It was challenging, of course," Haigh says. "It's not going to be easy, living on a boat for all that time. But I think, for me, and I think for most of the cast, Jack included, we relished being up there. It felt like we were separate from the world, which is what these men were when they were on the whaling ship."

And being in such a remote location had its perks. O'Connell and some of his fellow cast members did cold-water dives and spotted polar bears from their ship. In a practical sense, too, Haigh says, he benefited from the remoteness as a director. "There were no execs on the ship, and no one could even see any dailies. There was no internet, and no way to transport anything back because we were on a ship in the middle of the ocean," he laughs.

"Once you've been there, you come back and think: did we do that?", Haigh says, recalling one morning where "we had to find some ice to work on, and we spent the day floating around in the ship breaking through sea ice and trying to find somewhere to work. It's an insane environment to be in, and yet you kind of get used to it. You're like 'oh, look, a polar bear'."

Still, there was another presence scarier than this apex predator lurking around. Farrell's malignant Drax – a man so unkempt and wild-eyed as to almost emanate a foul smell through the screen – was key to offering a foil for O'Connell’s protagonist Sumner. And though Sumner is the heart of the show, a flawed man who seeks to be better, the pair find a certain dark yin and yang – a mirror-likeness – in one another. "Getting to know Colin [Farrell] is a different experience to witnessing him do Henry Drax," O’Connell says. "He spent a lot of his own time [during the shoot] in a very heavy state of contemplation. A lot of that time on the ship, there were times Colin would eat on his own. And that was not to be antisocial: we just knew we had this heavy undertaking, and he just needed to have the space to be able to achieve that."

It's understandable when taking on a role like Drax. He is a repulsive person: a bad man who only reveals the darker voids of his soul as time proceeds. He is driven by an untrammelled, monstrous instinct, destroying everything in his path on a whim. In many ways, Sumner and Drax provide two opposing views of humanity, particularly prevalent in the 19th Century, representing order versus chaos, gentleness versus brutality.

Its brutal worldview

But The North Water's genius is in exposing this false dichotomy, positing that it is impossible not to flirt with brutality, or chaos, in the face of the evils of the British Empire. As the men greedily gobble up the natural resources of the environment around them, spumes of blood darken the sea and the carcasses of clubbed seals stain ice floes. And people fare little better. Racist remarks made about the Irish – and even worse ones made about the local Inuit people – give some glimpse into the edifice of colonial power and masculinity of the late 1850s.

"You can't tell a story like this without exploring masculinity," says Haigh. "These men are out there, raping the world of its resources, acting in horrendous ways to each other. But they are flawed individuals struggling to get on in the world themselves. You do see the worst. And you do sometimes see the best. I mean, I don't think there's much best in Drax. But Sumner is trying to be a better person and deal with his past. And when he's thrown into this kind of maelstrom of men, all out seemingly for themselves, that's kind of where the chaos begins."

The first episode opens with a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: "The world is hell, and men are both the tormented souls and the devils within it". The philosophical dimensions of the series are plain to see, but never highfalutin. "This is not some story of redemption," Haigh says. "It's not like: now I can move on and be happy. That isn't what the story is. One horror happens, then another horror happens. You just have to keep dealing with them one by one by one. And the idea of finding some kind of redemption is probably a flawed idea at best."

O'Connell pipes up suddenly. "There's a great quote that Sumner uses: perhaps life should not be bludgeoned into submission. I've used that in my own life since," He pauses, and grins wolfishly. "Now I've got people thinking I'm a philosopher."

The actor hits on an essential question of the series: how do you hold onto decency, to compassion, within the churn of the evil that men do? We may have to accept that there's no way to rationalise the world around us, or bend it, into the shape we might like it to take on. While providing no easy answers, The North Water explores deep and chewy ideas that far transcend its remote historical setting. It's a show about humankind, manhood, empire, and cruelty. In 2021 as ever, that made it timeless.

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