Marc Munden and Jack Thorne make Lord of the Flies frightening again, with a young cast that makes its cruelty hard to bear. Four episodes stretch the material, but this is an adaptation worth making time for.
Lord of the Flies makes a persuasive case for another adaptation, though four episodes give it more space than it needs. Writer Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden approach the boys with sympathy without making their behaviour any easier to watch. They want us to recognise children before we start sorting them into examples of everything wrong with humanity. That matters here, because the familiar story could so easily become an illustrated lecture, with the cast required to demonstrate a conclusion we arrived at before they appeared.
The young cast gives that approach its force, particularly David McKenna as Nicholas “Piggy” and Lox Pratt as Jack Merridew. Their performances have enough uncertainty in them to make us attend to the boys’ responses rather than simply wait for the next turn of the plot. Winston Sawyers’s Ralph is part of the same convincing group, with little sense of children carefully delivering important material. There is a plainness to the acting that holds our attention even when Munden makes the images more peculiar.
The structure helps. Moving between individual boys’ perspectives gives Thorne a reason to revisit the group’s behaviour, and allows different fears to matter at different points. Sparse dialogue leaves the actors room to suggest what the boys cannot comfortably say, particularly when being accepted by the others seems to depend on going along with them. In a survival drama, the practical business of getting through the day can be enough; here, the more absorbing question is how children decide which other child they will obey.
Mark Wolf’s cinematography makes the island difficult to enjoy as scenery, with close-ups and distorted views that keep drawing attention back to the children. We found those close-ups frightening because the faces still look so young; it is harder to keep the cruelty at a comfortable distance. Simon Walker’s production design makes the island credible enough for the stranger images to work, and Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s music sustains the discomfort. Yet some of the camera choices press too hard, announcing how disturbing a moment is before the actors have finished showing us. The performances give Munden good reason to ease off.
The more substantial reservation is the length. Four episodes allow the boys to become people we spend time with, but sometimes there is too little change in the tension from one stretch to the next. Thorne’s attention to the children is welcome, but staying longer with them does not always deepen our understanding of what they do. A tighter version could have kept that sympathy and spared us the sense that the series occasionally mistrusts the strength of what it has already shown.
This is survival drama with little interest in offering the usual pleasures of resourcefulness and escape. Its attention stays on how the boys treat one another once they begin competing for power. We recommend it to anyone willing to sit with that discomfort, including those who feel they have had enough adaptations of this story. Leave something gentler for afterwards.
