This drama set on a desert island is a “daring and terrifying” nightmare ★★★★☆

Teenage author Jack Thorne has adapted William Golding’s classic novel for his latest TV series about young, murderous males – but it’s a very different beast.

Jack Thorne has long been a popular and prolific playwright and screenwriter, with credits including Harry Potter and the Cursed Child who achieved great success on stage. However, last year’s Netflix phenomenon “Teenage,” which he co-created with actor Stephen Graham, sent him into a different layer of the atmosphere, given how its story about a 13-year-old killer cleaned up the Emmy Awards and sparked global controversy.

So you might say that Thorne then choosing to adapt William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies was both good brand building and tempting fate, given its superficial narrative similarities – another tale of boys behaving outrageously. However, Golding’s story of a school team gradually descending into violent chaos and murder after their plane crashes on a desert island, is a different beast entirely – more an allegory about the troubles of society than the troubles of male youth.

What Thorne accomplishes in these four bold and terrifying parts with great expertise is to make the narrative work on two levels—naturally, as a tense, immersive thriller, and philosophically, as a dark investigation into the insidiousness of collective human behavior.

His version of the story, which had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, retains the book’s time frame, with the boys speaking in an old-fashioned, upper-crust British idiom that includes “long vacations”, “togs” (clothes), and “toothpaste” (toothpaste). But otherwise, as is the case with widely studied classics, this feels strikingly fresh and distinct.

Structurally, Thorne’s main innovation is to present each episode from a different point of view, giving them an intimacy of characterization complemented by Mark Munden’s poignant direction. From the disorienting fish-eye lens photography to the Terrence Malick-style cut-outs to nature in motion (swarming ants and scurrying beetles), Munden truly envelops the viewer in island life. Meanwhile, the over-saturated color palette – blazing reds and oranges, eerily glowing greens – gives the whole thing a hallucinatory, nightmare-like quality, something reinforced by the thundering, dissonant score by The White Lotus’ composer, Cristobal Tapia de Fer.