Looking at slavery without looking away. The challenge of ‘Underground Railroad.’
“The Underground Railroad,” Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, is a fantastical trip into America’s brutal past. On the Randall plantation in Georgia, young Cora, played by Thuso Mbedu, dreams of freedom. Her future is forever changed when an enslaved man, Cesar (Aaron Pierre), tells her of the Underground Railroad and takes her as his good luck charm when he escapes.
We soon discover that this railroad is no analogy but real, running on rails secreted underground, complete with conductors both whimsical and reluctant. Cora travels beneath the antebellum South, searching for a
