Steven Prusakowski
(Warning: major spoilers ahead.)
Over 30 years ago I first read Lord of the Flies, the story of a plane full of schoolboys stranded on a tropical island. I never forgot it, mainly because the book scarred me. There was one scene in particular that my version of what I envisioned is forever seared into my brain.
The same is true for writer Jack Thorne (Adolescence) who adapted the newest version of the classic novel for the Netflix limited series. The book is timeless and forever haunting, which remains true for the Thorne and director Marc Munden adaptation which perfectly captures the feel of the novel while injecting some fresh visual storytelling. Awards Radar spoke to the pair about bringing Golding’s story to the screen today. (Watch the full interview following the article)
Thorne and Munden’s four-part Netflix series dives deep into the boys’ fragility and complexity, turning what many remember as a brutal tale into something tender yet still profoundly unsettling. “It was a book that changed me. I read it late at night. It was my mom’s copy. I wasn’t doing it for school. I just read it because it was on the shelf and I had that moment that happens very rarely in literature, film, TV, books, everything where you go, I am someone. I am this person. And that for me was Simon (played by Ike Talbut). I understood why Simon was as Simon was and then suddenly two-thirds of the way through the book, my character was killed and I remember the sort of heart being pulled out of my chest,” shared Throne.
“It really felt like that to me where he talked about the body drifting out to sea and I was like, ‘What? How could this happen? How could this happen to someone I love?’ And then I kept going back to it. It was one of those books I just kept rereading and rereading and rereading,” he continued.
The adaptation structures episodes around key characters Piggy (David McKenna), Jack (Lox Pratt), Simon, and Ralph (Winston Sawyers) creating an intimate look at how quickly order dissolves and chaos ensues once the constraints of modern society are removed. Munden emphasized hhow thse story still resonates today. “The world’s still full of those confused little boys creating chaos in the world in the guise of men and hopefully this is a little microcosm of that which helps us understand that.”
Director Marc Munden added layers of unease through immersive, documentary-style camerawork and hallucinatory visuals that echo the boys’ psychological breakdown. “I really felt that I wanted to use the island as an element to sort of echo what the boys were going through. And that was behind a lot of decisions about the hallucinatory foliage. I just tried to make them echo what was going on within this little group of boys. It all comes back to that little group of characters. It all comes back to all those motivations. Everything should echo out from that,” the director noted
Despite how grim the story can be, Thorne, who first encountered the book as a child and was marked by it, sees threads of hope in the story even today. “I find loads of threads of hope. I think Golding finds hope. I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about what happens on that island… There’s loads of tenderness there. There’s loads of moments of true emotional connection that happened on that island and if they’d only happen in a slightly different way, if only these boys had been socialized slightly differently, then maybe that island could have been a beautiful place,” said Thorne.
The result feels perhaps even more relevant in 2026, a haunting reminder that the real danger was never the island itself it was what the boys brought with them. In Thorne and Munden’s hands, Golding’s tale continues to scar in the best possible way.
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