Jack Thorne swings hard, but subtlety gets lost on the island
⭐ 6/10
Spoiler Warning: This review discusses major plot points from Lord of the Flies on BBC iPlayer.
I can see the intent, and I respect the nerve. This version of Lord of the Flies wants to rattle the cage, to drag a familiar moral nightmare into the present-day TV expectation and make it howl. The performances help. They are raw, committed, and often excellent. Piggy in particular carries a bruised humanity that lingers after the screen fades to black.
But somewhere between the ambition and the execution, the thing starts to slip through its own fingers.
The series leans heavily on atmosphere, on long looks at sunlit menace and crawling insects, on a soundtrack that never quite knows when to stop shouting. It pushes and prods, desperate for impact, yet too often the effect feels self-conscious. My wife and I shared that sideways glance more than once, the silent question hanging in the air: What was the point of that?
There is craft here, no doubt. The island sweats and snarls, the descent
into savagery ticks along as expected. Yet the dread that once made this story unavoidable rarely settles. The pacing drags, the silences stretch thin, and the visual quirks start to feel like decoration rather than meaning.
Worse, the urge to explain everything drains the tale of its bite. Trauma neatly labelled, cruelty traced back to tidy origins, psychology laid out like a case file. The old terror lay in the thought that this darkness needed no backstory. It simply waited.
As television, it is watchable. As an interpretation of Lord of the Flies, it feels overworked and underpowered. A bold swing, yes. A clean hit, not quite.
The full season is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer, and if you are watching from outside the UK there is a straightforward workaround. LibertyShield VPN lets you access BBC iPlayer and other UK TV platforms from anywhere, on any device, with a 48 hour free trial that gives you enough time to see whether this island ordeal is one you want to endure in full.