What to watch this weekend: Richard Flanagan’s Booker winner gets the prestige treatment on Prime, while Agatha Christie goes glossy on BritBox | Canada Voices

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Prime Video

This five-part adaptation of Australian Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel arrives in full in Canada on April 18 on Amazon’s streamer – not necessarily the expected home for sumptuously cinematic takes on historical fiction. We meet doctor Dorrigo on two timelines – as a young man (Jacob Elordi) during the Second World War, sustained through brutal experiences by his passion for a woman not his wife, and in the 1980s (now played by Ciarán Hinds), uncomfortable with the hero status bestowed upon him as a former Far East prisoner of war. The series, written by Shaun Grant and directed by Justin Kurzel, is unflinching in its depiction of how these men were used as forced labour to build the Burma Railway. But the literariness of Flanagan’s writing remains: After a reading of Mithridatum of Despair by Australian poet Max Harris, Dorrigo and his uncle’s young wife, Amy (an aflame Odessa Young), flirt through an exchange of lines from Catullus and Sappho, which practically burns through the screen.

Towards Zero, BritBox

Detective stories begin in the wrong place when they begin with murder. So says Strange family lawyer Treves, played by The Wire great Clarke Peters slathering on a buttery British accent, at a formal dinner in a country house at the start of this limited series based on a 1944 Agatha Christie novel. “The story begins long before, when the murder is seeded,” he says. “The point zero if you will.” Divisive owing to its slow acceleration from zero when it first aired in Britain on BBC One last month, the three-episode structure is a bit wonky, but there’s little else to really complain about. A star tennis player, his new flapper wife and his flapper ex-wife, and a depressive inspector played by Matthew Rhys populate this lovely looking and mildly anachronistic mystery – with Anjelica Huston in a dowager role previously reserved for Maggie Smith: “You will not make a mockery of marriage under my roof.” All three episodes available April 18.

Flow, Crave

Oscar voters love a dialogue-free movie – but my kids, too, were captivated by this recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, which follows the adventures of a black cat escaping rising water in a mildly pixelated posthuman world. The unnamed feline hero is joined by a loveable Labrador retriever, a confident capybara (I didn’t recognize the larger rodent, but my five-year-old went wild – “look, a capybara!”), a junk-hoarding lemur and a regal secretarybird on what turns into a boat journey through abandoned civilization built on spire-like mountains. Adults may see a climate migration allegory, but this beautiful, at times mystical, movie from Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis is mainly about the ebb and flow of change in general and recognizing who you are amidst it.

Under the Bridge, CBC Gem

I’m asked: What should I watch next after Adolescence? If you didn’t catch it on Disney+ last year, this Hulu true-crime series based on late Canadian author Rebecca Godfrey’s book of the same name, about the Victoria murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in 1997, is now available through CBC’s free-with-ads streamer Gem (April 18). It’s another whydunit about teen violence, focusing on the girls who were involved in Virk’s beating and death. Riley Keough plays a version of Godfrey, while Lily Gladstone is the cop investigating – and there’s some exceptional work by some of the young cast. This is a glossier, more conventionally true-crime approach to the subject matter and there are a couple blips in the script where it’s clear Americans are writing about Canadians – but it’s worth resurfacing the conversations about troubled teens that existed before there was the effect of COVID-19 to worry about or social media to panic about.

Chloe, CBC Gem

This 2010 Atom Egoyan thriller – not his most critically adored, but his most commercial successful – is added to the public broadcaster’s streamer’s library of films on April 18. It stars Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried – with whom the Canadian filmmaker recently reteamed on Seven Veils. Based on the 2003 French film Nathalie, Chloe tells the story of a suspicious wife who hires a sex worker to tempt her husband to see if her jealousy is justified. Though this fable-like premise may not have been his idea, Egoyan makes it his own, Liam Lacey wrote in his review for The Globe and Mail. “To start, he sets it in his hometown of Toronto, which effectively becomes another character. Landmarks from Yorkville to Queen Street emphasize the city as a place of urbane privilege, with frequent angular shots of glass structures adding an undertone of menace.”