Threads (1984)

I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

• J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita

Ok. Threads. Oh, my God Threads. Seriously, if you think you've seen it all – if you think you've seen every horrifying film under the sun, and there's nothing cinema can throw at you any more – watch this. Because believe me, this beats everything else. A Serbian Film, Funny Games, Hostel, whatever – they aren't shit next to this. I mean, those films aren't shit in general, but even just in terms of being a truly, truly grueling experience, Threads makes the nastiest piece of torture porn look like Thomas the Tank Engine. And the most remarkable thing is that it does it with barely any gore. Threads manages to be ten times as horrifying as any of the Saw films without resorting to any of the cheap shock tactics those films employ. 

Alright, I'll back up a bit. Threads is a 1984 BBC television drama directed by Mick Jackson, who also directed The Bodyguard. It's essentially a drama depicting what the results of a nuclear war would look like, and it is every bit as brutal as it sounds. The thing is that it's not a post-apocalyptic film in the standard Hollywood style. Those films are all optimistic in one way or another – even in The Road, which is the obvious point of comparison, the horror is balanced out with aesthetics. In the book you have the majesty of Cormac McCarthy's prose, and in the film you've got the visuals that kind of have the same quality as the descriptions in the book, these huge landscapes that are devastated but still somehow beautiful. You get none of that in Threads. What you have instead is a detached, almost documentary-style film about a nuclear holocaust. And it is the hardest thing that I've ever had to watch. Just on a purely emotional level, the horror that these characters experience, and the lack of hope, is really draining on the viewer. This is one of those films where at the end of it you feel like you've gone through something. Part of what creates that effect is the way the film drags. With most post-apocalyptic films, you get a quick introduction to the characters, and then the big catastrophe happens within twenty or thirty minutes. In Threads, it takes three quarters of an hour, and for that whole time it seems inevitable, partly because you already know what the film's about, but also because of the way the story's told. The writer really gives the impression that there's no way out for these characters, that they're completely and utterly fucked. Another thing that really marks Threads out is the way it focuses on the characters. When you see ruined buildings in this film you're not seeing these big, special-effects landscapes designed to impress you; you're seeing through the eyes of the people who've lived in those buildings, who built their lives around them. The emphasis isn't on how cool it looks when a city gets blown up, it's on how awful it is to live in a city that gets blown up. 

Ultimately I don't know if I can recommend this, just because it is so bleak, and so punishing, and there's really no pay-off. Threads was made at a time when nuclear war was a real threat, with the purpose of convincing people that nuclear war had to be avoided at all costs. So, it makes sense on a functional level for it to be one hundred and twelve minutes of unrelenting suffering, but it does make for a pretty unrewarding watch.