Hit the North:The North Water.

"Save me, save me from tomorrow. I don't want to sail with this ship of fools" - Ship of Fools, World Party

To describe the crew of the Volunteer, the boat in which most of the action takes places in Andrew Haigh's The North Water (BBC2/iPlayer, based on a novel by Ian McGuire), as a ship of fools would, in truth, be inaccurate. While there are fools on board, most of the main players are either articulate and knowledgeable or, if not, at least incredibly cunning. A more correct description would be a ship of cunts.

If that kind of language offends you then stay well away from The North Water because c-bombs are dropped more regularly than anchors. You may also want to look away during some rather squeamish scenes of crude surgery (performed, of course, without anaesthetic) and one pretty unpleasant episode of very vicious seal clubbing.

Although it's not as if a seal could ever be clubbed nicely. Thankfully, all this is balanced out with some very beautiful shots of endless icy landscapes, floating bergs, and all the usual nautical paraphernalia. If you're a fan of observing frost encrusted beards and whiskers there's a lot in The North Water to enjoy even if it does hew a little too close, at times, to David Kajganich's recent The Terror.

It almost feels as if they had the set left over from The Terror so thought they might as well make use of it. But while The North Water takes a similar geographical, and moral, journey as The Terror it is never quite as addictive a watch. Mildly gripping would sum it up, and if that's to damn it with faint praise then so be it. It's so well acted, so beautifully shot, and so full of surprise twists and turns that that easily compensates for the occasional bout of longueurs.

Which, come to think of it, seems perfectly appropriate for a film in which people seem destined to end up trapped in a boat in the Arctic for an entire winter. Hull, 1859, and the Volunteer leaves dock to set off on a Arctic whaling expedition. The captain is Arthur Brownlee (Stephen Graham) and his first mate is Michael Cavendish (Sam Spruell).

While Brownlee seems, on the surface, a decent man - a wily old sea dog with at least some basic moral sensibility, Cavendish is a vulgarian par excellence. On arriving in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands he proclaims his needs:- "a decent drink and a good wet slice of pussy" and is not shy of beating up other crew members - or even conspiring to have them killed.

Remarkably, he's not the most dangerous man on board. That honour goes to the almost cartoon like Henry Drax (Colin Farrell). A harpooner and a violent drunk who we see, early on, attempting to trade his own boots for a tot of rum. Foodwise, he's less fussy, boasting that he'll eat anything and then offering us a little taster menu: - "brains, bollocks, arseholes".

He's joined on the Volunteer by fresh faced Jones (Kieran Urquhart), a man who optimistically places hope above fear, jaded but kind Otto (Roland Moller) who talks of morality beyond circumstance, and ship's doctor Patrick Sumner (Jack O'Connell), a former army surgeon who is haunted by his own dark secrets. We see, in flashback, traumatic incidents from his military exploits in India.

When Drax and Cavendish discover a valuable ring from his spoils on the subcontinent they hatch a fiendish plan. But it's nothing compared to the one that Brownlee has struck with company head Baxter (Tom Courtenay) to sink the vessel and claim on the insurance. A plan that is revealed to us, the viewer, early on in the first episode but only starts to become apparent to other crew members when Jones asks why they are charting waters so far north to a place where no whale has ever been caught.

Soon, there is a serious threat of mutiny and, from thereon in, things go from very bad to even worse. Sumner gets beaten up and becomes violently seasick and he's one of the lucky ones. Others suffer sexual assault and it's not long before we witness our first murder. Suspicion, inevitably, stalks the decks of the Volunteer and during an encounter with 'eskimos', which could result in vital food being sourced, the different approaches of the various shipmates inevitably leads to disaster.

Cavendish, for example, believes the natives are only interested in things they can either eat, burn, or fuck. Cavendish is your common or garden variety of crude ruffian but Henry Drax is a far more complex character than he initially appears. His brutality and indifference to others is borne of his harsh experience of life and he admits, quite freely, to following his inclinations no matter how base they may be.

He believes that in this he is no different to all men. How he differs, he offers, is that he neither needs law nor morality to justify his actions. To Drax, one thing happens and then another and that's it. He is, in a small way, like all of us, a child at heart. Or even an animal. The more liberal and worldly Sumner is, far more than Drax, the conflicted moral heart of the drama and it is his journey we, the viewers, are encouraged to empathise most with.

In a programme that begins with a quote from the gloomy German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ("the world is hell and men are both the tormented souls and the devils within it") it comes as no surprise that there is an existentialist, even nihilist, ambience to everything happens. The whoring, the boozing, the fighting, and the description of whalers as "refugees from civilisation" all seem to act as distraction from the joyless existence of these men's lives.

They inhabit a world of laudanum, pipes, rum, typhus, grimy candlelit public houses, dust particles floating in the rays of light through cabin windows, anal rape, and stuffed monkeys in apothecaries on cobbled streets and they go on journeys which end in them eating whale blubber (which looks as if an eczema afflicted Spongebob Squarepants has been sliced up into shashlik) and where a cabin boy is, quite literally, rogered.

There's even a scene in which one crew member secrets himself in the body of a dead polar bear (a quite unrealistic looking one it has to be said, to me he looked like he'd just finished shooting a Fox's Glacier Mint commercial). The North Water thrives on people clinging loosely to their sanity, or losing it entirely, in a hostile environment (in Johnsonian times, the hostile environment remains popular) and the question it seems to ask most loudly, apart from who might survive this horror, is how do these "refugees from civilisation" return to normal life?

Is it even possible? With a tense score from the Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker (as well as shanties from Grant Olding and reels c/o Gemma Donald) and winning cameos from Peter Mullan (always a safe pair of hands) as a missionary priest and Nive Nielsen (who also appeared in The Terror, cementing those comparisons yet further) as his wife Anna,  The North Water is enjoyably dark and compelling enough to keep you watching until the very end even if it never quite ramps the terror (!) up to the degree of other similar dramas.

When it is cold, we look for warmth. That, as one unfortunate polar bear discovers, can lead us to some very strange and unsettling places. They could be a pub in Hull, a brothel in Lerwick, or the endless plains of frozen ice that make up the Arctic wasteland. Or the strange and unsettling places could, of course, be inside our heads all along. Andrew Haigh and the cast of The North Water took us to all of those places and it brought us back too. But how many returned with us?