In Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” Martin as she escapes slavery, rouses her before dawn to witness something ghastly.
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.
If you choose to watch “The Underground Railroad,” whose roughly 10 hours arrive Friday on Amazon Prime Video, yes, you will see atrocities.
One escapee is flayed and burned to death on the lawn while the owner and his guests enjoy a sunlit banquet and dancing — a vision of hell as entertainment in someone else’s heaven.
As in several recent stories — the movie “Harriet,” the series “Underground” — an abolitionist network abets Cora and Caesar’s escape.
That face proves to be multiple and monstrous.
Mbedu’s magnetic performance relies as much on gesture and expression as dialogue, her every sign, flinch and defense conveying the muscle memory of terror.
“Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk” proved that Jenkins is gifted with intimate scenes, but his action sequences are just as striking.
All this is more than technical wizardry; the aesthetics are inseparable from the story.
It’s as if he has figured out how to funnel more feeling through a camera lens than anyone else.
Likewise, Jenkins’s artistry keeps his characters from becoming merely the sum of their pain.
At times, the series can feel digressive or sluggish, but mainly Jenkins is taking the needed time to fill in every corner of his mural.
The tightly constructed installments — 20 minutes at shortest, but most an hour or more — need time to settle, resonate and echo.
“The Underground Railroad” is telling a story of people whose lives largely went unwitnessed and unrecorded, for a time when seemingly everything is captured and broadcast, when people have become exposed nerves taking in images of anguish and outrage.
But she carries something else: a small, rattling packet of okra seeds, the germ of a plant brought by Africans to the Americas, and the last remnant of the garden her mother once tended on the plantation.