The moral panic fuelled by Jack Thorne’s Adolescence has obscured the fact that this grim portrait of the modern male teenager was a triumph of style over substance. Alongside its dire warnings about the manosphere – specifically as they applied to lower-middle-class 13-year-old boys – the Netflix series leant into the bravura conceit of filming each episode in a single take.
If visually stunning, this ensured that much of the show’s power was rooted in gimmickry. The one-take trick felt like a sleight of hand to distract the viewer from a script full of logical leaps into the dark. For starters, would the police really arrest a 13-year-old suspected killer in a Swat-style predawn raid? Or did it happen just because it made for a crash-bang-wallop opening?
Thorne returns to the theme of boys as a signifier of the feral forces running just under the surface of society with an aesthetically rapturous but ultimately hollowed-out and stilted adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (BBC One, Sunday, 9pm), which loses focus amid an obsession with the exotic fauna and flora of its tropical island setting. You tune in expecting scorched earth insights into the fundamental ugliness of humanity – but instead it’s a glorified David Attenborough documentary (or an unasked-for BBC homage to esoteric film-maker Terrence Malick).
One thing the series gets absolutely right is casting. As doomed nerd Piggy, Belfast actor David McKenna (in his first screen role) is an incredible mix of vulnerability and underdog spikiness. Moreover, by giving him an Irish accent, Thorne draws out the class aspect of his conflict with privileged oik Jack (Lox Pratt) – an Aryan toff who seems to have parachuted in from Netflix’s The Crown.
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Golding is vague as to the circumstances leading up to the boys becoming marooned on a tropical outpost, where all quickly descends into savagery and bloodshed. Thorne and director Marc Munden maintain that ambivalence – it’s the 1950s, and some form of global conflict has forced the kids to be airlifted to safety, but that’s all the background we get.
As with Adolescence, Lord of the Flies is striking without being especially thought-provoking. The story begins from Piggy’s perspective, and as he negotiates the island, its sheer alien lushness is overpowering. There are some virtuoso set pieces – the arrival of Jack and his friends on the beach is staged as a sort of mini-Nuremberg rally with shades of the video to Joy Division’s Atmosphere. But the camera’s obsession with the terrible beauty of the island blunts the horror of the kids’ descent into darkness. It’s far too pretty to have anything meaningful to say about the ugly side of human nature.
