Rent Lord of the Flies (1963)

Arthouse dystopia. - Lord of the Flies review by Steve

Unusual dystopian allegory adapted from the classroom classic by William Golding. A group of English public schoolboys are washed up on an uninhabited island in the Pacific during a nuclear war. Isolated from the normal control of civilisation, they revert to a state of tribal savagery. The influence of society is superficial and soon abandoned.

Theatre director Peter Brook took 30 children to Puerto Rico during their summer holidays and improvised the action. The amateur performances are sometimes laboured, but effective. Tom Chapin is well cast as the leader of the hunters, and Tom Gaman has a little awkward, mystical magnetism as the most enlightened of the boys.

It's experimental cinema, but more appealing than that sounds. While the film explores philosophical concepts, there is still narrative realism as the group divides into factions founded on their degree of self-interest or the waning pull of reason. So it's natural to take a side. In their primitive state, the boys still reflect normal social and political hierarchies.

The location photography makes a huge contribution to the ultra-realistic style. It would be tempting to call this film unique, except it was remade in 1990... But the '63 version is more faithful to the novel and gets closer to the primal state. There are many desert island films which explore the isolation of the human animal from society. This is the most pessimistic.