Worst-Case Scenario
The vision of nuclear holocaust in Threads (1984) remains visceral and urgent.
Still from Threads.
The audience at the 1984 press screening of Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s BBC TV film Threads apparently walked out in numbed silence. One of them, the novelist Russell Hoban, concluded in The Listener,
This is not a film to be reviewed as a film; its art is that it cancels all aesthetic distance between our unthinking and the unthinkable: here is the death of our life and the birth of a new life for our children, a life … of slow death by radiation sickness and plagues and starvation and quick death by violence.
is a virtually faultless film, but as Hoban suggests, its unrelenting bleakness makes it all but impossible to recommend to someone one likes. That said, it has recently won a “” poll, and tonight, April 10, it’s showing at the Barbican Centre, in London. Spoiler alerts are irrelevant; the movie will spoil your day however you see it. In its harrowing vision of Britain.
