The thick Southern accents, fancy canes and general unease the Randall’s inspire is familiar. She dismisses his request out of hand and rejoins the festivities that are abruptly interrupted by the slave owning Randall brothers. Caesar (Aaron Pierre) asks Cora to run away with him. Opening with a surreal and eerie sequence of Cora falling backwards through time, we land on the Randall plantation in Georgia, during a meagre birthday party the enslaved are throwing among themselves. In the first episode, Jenkins establishes exactly what this series will and won’t be. By synthesising the skills of his trusted regular collaborators, composer Nicholas Britell and cinematographer James Laxton, and perhaps most importantly the nuanced and compassionate performance from lead actress Mbedu, Jenkins is at the height of his powers when fluidly mutating the style and tone of every scene to align with Cora’s brittle interiority. In this series, Jenkins imbues every member of the principle cast with a profound humanity that seeps into the bones. Often enough, depictions of the slave experience on screen have reduced slave owners to caricature arbiters of extreme violence, unrecognisably cruel and easy to dismiss, with enslaved people presented as little more than receptacles of that violence. In a groundbreaking 10-part series for Amazon Prime, Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins masterfully elevates this epic and complex tale. We follow the teenaged Cora (Thuso Mbedu) in her quest for freedom from the numerous inventive cruelties of America. It conceives of an alternate reality where a literal rail network actually exists. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2016 novel ‘The Underground Railroad’ tells the story of the secret routes and safe houses that existed for enslaved African-Americans to escape to the free states and Canada.
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