Five Days at Memorial review: harrowing account of Hurricane Katrina and the impossible choices that followed

“What stands out to me is that it was just five days,” remarks Dr. Bryant King, swallowing slightly as he speaks. “It only took five days for everything to fall apart,” he continues, explaining to state attorney investigators what happened at Memorial Hospital, refusing to meet their gaze. They push him further, asking what he means when he says things fell apart. “You couldn’t stop patients from dying – or you couldn’t stop them from being killed?”

Five Days at Memorial opens on 28 August 2005. Hurricane Katrina is approaching New Orleans, and people are sheltering in Memorial Hospital – alongside, of course, all the patients in care and doctors employed there already. The hurricane itself is immediately damaging to the hospital, but New Orleans is a city particularly prone to flooding: the levees overflow and huge waves crash down on the city, tearing houses out of their foundations, sweeping up cars and electricity pylons, water razing everything in its path to the ground. Memorial Hospital has an emergency plan for a hurricane, but they’re not prepared for a flood, and they’re certainly not in a position to evacuate patients. For five days, thousands of staff and patients were trapped in the hospital.

It’s not long before the electricity is disconnected and the backup generators fail (“without power, it’s not a hospital, it’s just a building”), and the hospital staff become increasingly reliant on partial, improvised solutions. Without air conditioning, the hospital is humid and suffocating, everyone’s face glistening with sweat; they’re fast running out of food, fresh water, and medical supplies; treatment options start to falter and a triage mentality begins to set in. Efforts to evacuate the hospital are frustrated at every turn, as nominal authority figures. from the hospital’s corporate owners to state officials, try and avoid legal liability.

Five Days at Memorial is a sharply written, excoriating piece of drama, as much about the failures of structures outside the hospital as within. An early subplot about slow bureaucracy arranging evacuation – suits in a comfortable office, wondering idly if the hurricane might profit their parent company – gradually disappears from the narrative, pointedly and deliberately going nowhere. But it’s smart, too, about the rationalisations and the compromises made in desperate situations: bargaining and prioritising, cautious discussion of hypotheticals, euphemisms creeping into conversation. The initial insistence that every patient be evacuated becomes qualified and caveated. “No living patient will be left behind,” they start to say, and the unspoken idea – long looming in the background – to euthanise patients begins to solidify.

What’s striking about Five Days at Memorial as well is its subtlety in how it depicts these decisions. It indulges in the ambiguity of the moment, rarely conceding who knows what when; John Ridley’s script has quite an acute sense of how paranoia spreads in close-quarters, and how that paranoia is soon tempered by unspoken implications. That idea of what people can and can’t bring themselves to acknowledge runs through the heart of the show – camerawork that emphasises the act of bearing witness with these long close-up shots of eyes, sound design that cuts out and leaves key dialogue deliberately silent – which contributes to that sense of (some of) the medical staff gradually repositioning themselves to tacitly endorse euthanasia.

There’s a fantastic scene towards the midpoint of the series where the crisis response co-ordinator Sandra (Cherry Jones) tells Horace (Robert Pine), an older doctor, that he should leave with the next group of evacuees. “There’s nothing more I would ask you to do,” she says to him with a hug, and suddenly doubt is cast on the seemingly kindly offer: is she asking him to leave because he’d argue against euthanising patients? Is it a kindness after all – is she making sure he’s not there, so it doesn’t weigh on his conscience? He looks guilty, almost, when he passes Dr King in a corridor later – is it for leaving, or is it because he knows what’s going to happen next?

It’s the sort of nuanced drama that works in large part because Five Days at Memorial is so well cast, with even the smallest roles pitched perfectly. (Malube Uhindu-Gingala, in only a relatively minor role as one of several nurses, is responsible for one of the most memorable moments – this expression of relief, revulsion, and guilt all at once as she realises that in evacuating a baby she’s also escaping herself.) It’s a series that conveys a lot through implication and suggestion rather than dialogue, more about what’s left unsaid than what’s spoken aloud, with cast members like Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, and Adepero Oduye responsible for that economy of storytelling through their layered performances. Still, even as the series is incisive in its account of how the doctors convinced themselves to euthanise patients, it remains clear-eyed about the moral lapse itself – it’s murder, and it’s repeatedly underscored that this didn’t need to happen.

One of the big themes of Five Days at Memorial is faith: religious and secular, in doctors and in governments, in authority figures big and small. Time and time again that’s undercut – from President Bush’s visit to New Orleans exposed as a vanity tour, to bodies piling up in the hospital chapel. It’s always circling back to the opening image of the series, with a stars and stripes flag and a cardboard sign reading “pray for us” floating abandoned in grimy floodwater. They become icons defined ultimately by their absence across Five Days at Memorial, and in the end that dereliction of duty is key to its polemic and its point: there should’ve been another way.

Five Days at Memorial begins on Apple TV+ on Friday 12 August, with new episodes airing weekly; I saw 7 of an eventual 8 episodes of the show before writing this review. You can read more of our TV reviews here.