War Sailor is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year

War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in World War Two, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I think make it so cherishable: it’s meandering, episodic, understated and made in Norway, with subtitles.

Originally released last year as a feature film for the international category of the Oscars (where it was overshadowed by the more in-your-face All Quiet On the Western Front), War Sailor is the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made. But there’s nothing showy or obviously big budget about it. A lot of the money, I imagine, went on filming it out at sea (rather than in studio tanks), and on scenes like the gloriously realized U-boat looming over the torpedoed mariners in episode two. The general feeling, though, is much more intimate and claustrophobic. It reminds me a bit of one of my all-time favorite war dramas, Das Boot.

Our heroes are lifelong friends, Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and Sigbjorn (Pal Sverre Hagen), Bergen dockworkers who in 1939 enlist in the crew of a cargo ship bound for New York. Alfred is reluctant to leave his wife Cecilia (Ine Marie Wilmann) and three children for an eighteen-month voyage, but they desperately need the money. And anyway, Sigbjorn has promised the distraught daughter Maggie (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) that he will bring Dad home at whatever cost.

But of course war intervenes, all merchant vessels are commandeered by the Allies and Bergen is occupied by the Germans. Alfred and Sigbjorn are sucked into the escalating horror, depicted in a series of almost hallucinogenic vignettes: drowning mariners pleading for help as the vessel speeds cruelly past because the convoy cannot stop to pick them up; a crowded cellar in Malta, sheltering from another air raid; a dockside in New York patrolled by MPs whose job is to frustrate merchant crews’ understandable urge to jump ship, especially when they’ve heard that their next port of call is the suicide destination of Murmansk.

The dialogue is terse, sparse, which means you can concentrate on the visual detail — both epic and intimate — superbly evoked by director Gunnar Vikene. All the cast, especially the leads, have the most wonderful, expressive faces: they could have walked straight out of a mead hall or fought in a shield-wall in a Norse myth. It feels so right, so echt, in the way you just know it wouldn’t be if, say, the BBC were to make an equivalent series about the wartime merchant navy, which they’d no doubt ruin with anachronistic casting and stereotyping.

Like Das Boot, it doesn’t take sides. It’s about human suffering and endurance in war, not about goodies and baddies. So, for example, you share the mariners’ exultation in a cinema where they ecstatically cheer news footage of a surfaced U-boat being strafed by an Allied fighter, two terrified crewmen visible by the conning tower. But later, the commander of a U-boat that has torpedoed them punctiliously offers the stranded Norwegians water and food supplies. And later still, the aircraft that destroys Alfred’s children’s school is British, not German.

It’s about human suffering and endurance in war, not about goodies and baddies

According to my genius friend Mark Millar, movie trends move in eleven-year cycles, and we are currently entering a period where manliness can be celebrated on screen without embarrassment — as in, for example, the brooding machismo of the cowboys in Yellowstone, or Sylvester Stallone playing the old-school, 1980s gangster throwback in Tulsa King. I like this trend. It’s certainly preferable to the strained “You go, girl” implausibility of nonsense such as Rings of Power. ( Yes, there is a female crew member in War Sailor, but she certainly doesn’t look or behave like Galadriel. She’s just a normal, actual, non-token woman.)

But I wish they could depict these male worlds with the delicacy and psychological insight of War Sailor, rather than the overwrought, everything-must-be-hard-won earnestness you find with, say, Taylor Sheridan’s scripts for Yellowstone. Or, indeed, rather than the glibness of the “Hey, isn’t this great, lads? He’s fifty-six and he’s having a meaningless one-night stand with a woman he picked up in a cocktail bar” approach we find in the latest Paramount+ fast-paced bloke action series, Rabbit Hole. I’m probably in a minority, though.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.