Shaun Grant

The old man in The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2025) gives speeches about the war and goes home to a wife he does not look at. Shaun Grant's script does not tell us what he is thinking. It has already shown us the hotel on the coast and the camp in the jungle, and it leaves us to put the two together. That is how Grant writes: he puts a man in front of us, lets us watch him for a long time, and does not say why he is as he is. He did it in Snowtown (2011) and Nitram (2021), both with Kurzel, both about Australian men and violence, neither willing to explain it away.

He came to it late. He taught school for eight and a half years and wrote at night, then put his own money into the rights to the Snowtown murders and spent about three years on the screenplay. Kurzel directed it and the two have barely been apart since: True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Nitram, and now five episodes of The Narrow Road, which Grant created and wrote alone, with Kurzel directing all of them. In between he adapted Australian novels, Berlin Syndrome (2017) among them, and wrote the second-season finale of Mindhunter for David Fincher. Our review of that series does not mention him, which we take as a compliment; the episode sits inside the whole without a join showing.

Adaptation is where he is best. He has described reading a book once, without notes, for how it feels, then marking what cannot be cut before he drafts, and the method shows in The Narrow Road. Richard Flanagan's novel became the harshest account of the Burma Railway we have seen on television and the most tender about the affair that comes before it, and the tenderness is what gives the brutality somewhere to land. The camp episodes horrified us, which Grant plainly intended. The hotel episodes hurt more, because he had let us like these people first. His grandfather was a prisoner on that railway, and it shows in how little he is prepared to soften.

The cost of not explaining is that sometimes there is not much there. The 1980s strand of The Narrow Road is thin; Ciarán Hinds has the speeches and the marriage and not a great deal else to play, and five episodes is a long time to wait for the strand to earn its place. Some found Snowtown gruelling and short on causes. We have not reviewed it, but the complaint fits the habit, and Grant would probably not argue. "Prisoner of war camps shouldn’t be entertaining," he said of the series, and he has made sure of it.

He now co-owns a production company, Thirdborn, with Kurzel and Nicole O'Donohue, so the next ones will be his to choose. He has not yet written anyone who is comfortable. On current form, we would rather he did not start.