A very fancy version of Lord of the Flies is playing on Netflix as a four-part series, loaded up with arty flourishes like distorting fish-eye lens shots, blurred-out flashbacks, extreme slo-mo, many choppy montages, and a dramatically expressionistic color scheme. Some imagery is so desaturated, it’s basically black-and-white, and some imagery so saturated and CGI-ed, the jungle foliage is as bloodred as a slaughterhouse. Bombastic classical music thrums throughout to let you know this is an important work for the ages.

There are people who like this sort of thing. Those people are critics, who are falling all over themselves praising the script by playwright/screenwriter/producer Jack Thorne and the direction of Marc Munden. It seems Thorne had already won them over with the 2025 miniseries Adolescence, about a troubled thirteen-year-old British schoolboy suspected of murdering a girl who rejected his advances. Thorne’s version of Lord of the Flies is being perceived as a brilliant period companion piece to Adolescence.

I myself have a weakness for formal inventiveness, but this just feels like showing off. This Lord of the Flies is so padded, so full of pointless distractions, so insistent on its own profundity, it generates a sense of weird aesthetic gloating over its source material, William Golding’s famous 1954 novel about a group of preadolescent British schoolboys being evacuated during wartime, who crash-land and are stranded on an island without adult supervision and swiftly descend into savagery.