The Underground Railroad (Season 1)

The Underground Railroad (2021) is Barry Jenkins' limited drama series, ready to watch online on iFILM. Ten episodes adapt Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel. At its heart is Cora, a young enslaved woman on a Georgia cotton plantation who finally decides to run.

Jenkins takes the historical web of secret routes and safe houses and twists it: here the railroad is literal, with real tracks, tunnels and stations buried under the Southern soil. Every state Cora reaches becomes its own world with its own shape of violence, from towns that look civilized to outright horror. On her trail is the slave catcher Ridgeway, played by Joel Edgerton, and the gap between hunter and hunted keeps closing and tearing open again. Thuso Mbedu plays Cora so that holding her gaze is harder than looking away.

Jenkins, who made Moonlight, films slowly and with painterly care; cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Brittell turn nearly every frame into something you feel in the body. It is heavy and deliberately unhurried, less background entertainment than a sustained statement about memory and freedom. For anyone ready to sit with a serious auteur series, it lingers for a long time. Stream every episode of The Underground Railroad (2021) online on iFILM.