Fact and fiction collide in The Underground Railroad, a gut-wrenching story of slavery

A confronting reimagining of US slave history and white supremacy blurs the lines between fact and fiction in ways that will make you weep.

Thuso Mbedu in The Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad is from Oscar-winning Barry Jenkins, director of both Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title. It’s the story of Cora Randall, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia on a train that travels beneath the earth and that takes her around America, each episode conjuring a different look into her emerging consciousness.

The novel was described by the New York Times as a potent, almost hallucinatory epic, which “possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and with brushstrokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift.”

And those brushstrokes are apparent from the start in Jenkins’s imagining, especially the surreal, mythological strokes, in this beautifully directed, artfully composed piece of cinematic TV that shimmers with creative power and sings out so passionately about racial injustice and white supremacy in ways that make you weep.

The Underground Railroad was filmed in numerous locations and cities across the state of Georgia, including Savannah and Atlanta, over 116 days. In order to tell a cross country story – Jenkins calls it “a road trip” – the Oscar winner surrounded himself with a team he has trusted in the past on his features – among them cinematographer James Laxton, production designer Mark Friedberg, and costume designer, Caroline Eselin.

He needed the comfort of creative collaborators, as he says in a compelling director’s statement. He had feared this show from the beginning, he writes. It was an idea that had been “the thing haunting me; stalking me, waiting for me in the shadows of dim rooms, at the edges of conversations”. Just the notion of the imagery that he would need to cinematically create elicited feelings of shame in the director, of distress.

“The trauma arising from depictions of the American institution of slavery are so great that the very thought of creating such images is enough to bring forth this shame. And this shame is enough to mute, to taint those images to the point that the ethical questions regarding the efficacy of their existence potentially disallows their existence.”

But then, as the world changed in America, the image of slavery, “if presented at all, is abridged, amended, curtailed and coded to protect the legacy that leads to the siren call of ‘making America great again’.” So he decided, if not now, when?

Historically, a conjunction of several different clandestine efforts, the Underground Railroad in reality was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South.

Sympathetic to the slaves, people known as “conductors” arranged safe havens and guided fugitives north and west, hid them, moved them from hiding places that included churches, barns, homes and schoolhouses, known as “stations”. The fugitives travelling along the routes were called “passengers,” and those who had arrived at the safe houses were called “cargo”. (Jenkins says, in his statement, that as a child the words underground railroad evoked images for him of “black folks building and working and thriving on vessels of their own creation far beneath the ground”.)

We begin somewhere in antebellum times at a slave plantation in Georgia with Cora, a truly remarkable performance by South African actress Thuso Mbedu, being entreated to flee by the quiet man giant Caesar, also a splendid performance from Aaron Pierre.

“There is nothing here but suffering,” he tells her. “Pain and suffering.”

Initially she is reluctant to leave, not yet able to find what Whitehead calls “the kind of heroic desperation” to leave, deeply wounded by the presumed escape, and disappearance, of her mother, Mabel, years earlier and clinging to the small plot of land where she was born.

We are introduced to the notorious slave catcher Ridgeway, played with quiet intensity by Joel Edgerton, fervent believer in “manifest destiny”, driven by a passionate belief he is serving his country, rising to its calling. He tells plantation boss, the oddly epicene Terrance Randall, a telling, scary performance from Benjamin Walker, of something called “an underground railway” through which slaves can escape and slip through to another world.

He will become obsessed with Cora, the way he was with her mother, who he could never capture. It’s only after the apprehension of a slave called Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) who is whipped for the entertainment of plantation visitors, then doused with oil and roasted that Cora escapes with Caesar.

Over the years, in the novel Whitehead writes, Cora “had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft.” But there is something so ultimately more terrible in the death of Big Anthony, the way the slaves are forced to watch as he so slowly dies, forced to suppress their emotions to avoid punishment, as the white slave owners dance on the manicured lawns dressed in white, only just glimpsed through the smoke and flames.

It’s an extraordinary sequence, almost impossible to watch, but the slaves have no option, forced to observe in such an horrifically painful and inhumane way, Randall justifying it with a Bible reading.

It’s understandable that Amazon provided a therapist to the cast and crew on the ground, especially on days covering the brutality that took place during this time in American history when Jenkins filmed what he calls the “hard images” of slavery. And he and cinematographer James Laxton provide the most beautiful images to compensate – he calls their aesthetic, “this rainbow of tones” – celebrating the way that those who lived on the plantation found small moments of beauty in that life and even some belief.

A scene from The Underground Railroad

“What I wanted to look at was how they loved, their community, their joys and loves, all of which had to be robust to survive.”

After the barbaric episode of the execution, Cora and Caesar escape, running through rows of cotton, traipsing through bogs and marshes, sometimes hand-in-hand, and after a violent run-in with hog hunters, Cora forced to kill a young boy, they make their way to a farmhouse with a red roof. There a friendly abolitionist feeds them and leads them underground to an actual railroad and sends them to South Carolina. And then state by state as Cora seeks true freedom.

Whitehead’s “railroad” as realised so imaginatively by Jenkins, is a wonderful conceit, a flight of fantastical magic realism. It’s a real thing, concrete, clanking and steaming, a system of subterranean locomotives, a kind of subway system travelling on metal tracks taking former slaves through station after station across America representing even more malevolent versions of racism.

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America,” Cora and Caesar are told as they leave. What they will see we can only as yet guess.

Some may find the opening episode a little infuriating at times. The storytelling approach is impressionistic, conversations are sometimes hard to make out, Southern accents difficult to understand at times, submerged by the foreboding symphonic soundtrack of composer Nicholas Britell, full of ominous chords, and exposition is sacrificed to atmosphere.

It takes some time for Cora to take her place at the centre of this epic narrative but there’s little doubt she will inescapably dominate the next episodes as she is shadowed by the implacable Ridgeway. (Jenkins calls him, “basically my Arnold Schwarzenegger in the show, my Terminator.”)

It’s a show to devour once the initial premise is set and the pieces are in place, the stakes life or death for Cora as she will never survive if ever captured. There will be reversals and tragedies but as Jenkins says, we can already imagine his protagonists, “without question or hesitation, piloting themselves through will and grit and savvy and might”. As they head off down the dark tunnel, like the hero of Gulliver’s Travels, the book so beloved of Caesar, we also begin an astounding journey that takes us into a wonderfully cinematic blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction.

The Underground Railroad, streaming on Amazon Prime.