Marc Munden and Jack Thorne’s bold BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies transforms Golding’s classic into a visceral, visually daring and thematically urgent exploration of inherited trauma, masculinity, and violence.
Friday night at this year’s Berlinale 2026 was spent in a packed out screening of the first two episodes of Lord of the Flies. Writer and director dream team Marc Munden and writer Jack Thorne — of Adolescence, Help and The Secret Garden fame — have transformed the 1954 book by William Golding into a four part series, to be broadcast by the BBC.
Each episode centres a different character — shifting perspectives between Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack — the leaders of the band of boys who have been abandoned in a plane crash on a Pacific Island.
After the international success and critical praise for Adolescence, I had high hopes for this new project from Munden and Thorne, and was left far from disappointed. Golding’s island is brought to life with a masterful use of soundscape and a hyper intense colour palette, and an experimental cinematographic montage that oscillates between the dreamy, the eerie and the psychedelic. The heat, the humidity, the sweat and the insects create a suffocating intensity, with fish-eye distortions and lingering cutaways intensifying the audience’s sense of disorientation — particularly on the big screen.
What emerges is a visceral exploration of masculinity under the most extreme conditions. The boys’ attempts to organise themselves — to build shelters, maintain fires and establish rules about basic hygiene — are at constant odds with the pull toward dominance, spectacle, and tribalism. Whilst some interpretations of the original novel read it as an allegory of human brutality, this adaptation emphasises instead the humanity beneath the violence. It explores the weight and impact of the wartime trauma the boys have inherited from their parents, particularly their fathers. The echoes of the war permeate each character, lingering like a cloud over this pressure cooker of an island, ready to explode.
In this respect, the series feels as thematically relevant as Adolescence, offering a similarly nuanced and subtle critique of gender, violence, and emotional repression — although the creators were eager to point out in the Q&A after the screening that the boys in Lord of the Flies are pre-adolescent — a crucial distinction. The boys’ age, for Thorne and Munden, allows for a powerful exploration of how children learn how to reenact the violence and evil of the world around them. They are not inherently violent or evil; rather, they are shaped by deeper, inherited trauma. The political is seamlessly woven into the action-adventure narrative, inviting parallels with contemporary systems of war, patriarchy, and neglect
I left the screening eagerly anticipating the final two episodes. What I had expected to be an adaptation of a familiar tale felt like an experimental, contemporary exploration of how boys learn to become men in a world fractured by violence. The first two episodes function as a tense prologue, building toward a frenzied chaos — made all the more powerful by a viewing on the big screen. If you have the chance to get to the cinema to watch, I’d highly recommend it!
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
