Netflix’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ Adaptation Is a Harrowing Watch With a Stellar Young Cast: TV Review

“The Lord of the Flies” is the kind of show you praise by emphasizing how hard it is to watch. Adapted from William Golding’s classic 1954 novel by Jack Thorne (co-writer of “Adolescence”), directed by Marc Munden (“The Sympathizer”) and originally aired by the BBC before coming to Netflix in the U.S., the four-episode series doesn’t make any major changes to Golding’s potent allegory for the thin line separating civilization from savagery. The story of British schoolboys marooned on a remote tropical island without adult supervision isn’t modernized — it retains its World War II backdrop — or gender-swapped, like Showtime’s “Flies”-inflected “Yellowjackets.” It also doesn’t have to be. Simply watching these boys, played by a uniformly terrific cast of child actors, succumb to their worst instincts is harrowing enough to make you long to look away — even if you’d be missing some gripping drama.

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Each chapter of Thorne’s take is dedicated to a specific survivor of the plane crash that strands these Englishmen-to-be in the South Pacific: Piggy (David McKenna), the pudgy, bespectacled asthmatic who’s smart enough to see the need for toilets and shelters; Jack (Lox Pratt), the sneering bully who benefits the most from the breakdown of order; Simon (Ike Talbut), the sensitive soul dismissed by the others as “batty”; and Ralph (Winston Sawyers), the popular boy initially voted chief of the makeshift tribe who relies on Piggy’s advice. One advantage of watching rather than reading about these children — including the “big ’uns” looking after their (even) younger peers — is that they’re quite visibly children. This isn’t a teen soap where supposed 16-year-olds could order a martini without getting carded. Even the most monstrous of the islanders are young and impressionable enough to demand our empathy. We feel for these characters more than we judge them.

To the extent Thorne augments Golding’s story, it’s by adding more backstory about the boys’ home lives to explain what they have to lose, or gain, from a blank slate. But this work is just as ably accomplished by the ensemble’s high caliber of performance. McKenna and Pratt are standouts as, respectively, the most vulnerable and the most rapacious members of the community, but not a single actor comes off stiff or unnatural. Given that some are barely older than toddlers and much of the dialogue retains Golding’s midcentury diction, which can sound formal to our modern ears, it’s quite the feat. Sawyers does project more uncertainty than confidence as a character who’s meant to be a natural leader, though under the circumstances Ralph’s nerves are more than reasonable. More curious is the decision to make the character biracial, but not comment on the shift in a story that otherwise seizes on social divisions. Perhaps there’s only so much that can be squeezed into four hours of screen time.

Shooting on location in Malaysia, Munden plays up the hallucinatory effects of the boys’ isolation, which leads to paranoid fears of a mythical “beast” and cultish rituals built on a Darwinesque faith in survival of the fittest. Perspective is distorted, conveying both sweaty tropical heat and feverish anxiety. Saturation is upped, with trees glowing green by day and turning a nightmarish, surreal red by night. By the time the series’ namesake, a severed pig’s head surrounded by gnats, starts speaking to Simon in plain English, it’s almost expected. “The Lord of the Flies” doesn’t update its source material so much as forcefully convey the horror and tragedy of collective survival curdling into deadly brutality. The allegory is obvious. The humanity, for better and for worse, is what the show gives a youthful face.