About

More than three decades since its first broadcast on British television, Threads has cemented its reputation as an uncompromising and deeply disturbing masterpiece of nuclear cinema.

Working from a script by author Barry Hines (who had previously adapted his own novel 'A Kestrel for a Knave' for Ken Loach's Kes 1969), director Mick Jackson submerged himself in months of preparatory research about nuclear disasters and weaponry in an attempt to produce a painfully fathomable depiction of how international nuclear war would play out on English soil. Absent are macro-politicking and tales of heroism, in their place are working-class citizens subjected to apocalyptic destruction beyond their control or understanding.

The film is set in the English city of Sheffield. It initially follows a young engaged couple, Ruth and Jimmy, as they prepare for their reluctant wedding. News bulletins pass ambiently in the background of their lives, detailing a steady escalation of nuclear tensions between major superpowers. As the threat level grows, unprepared civil servants have emergency responsibilities foisted upon them while anti-government protests break out. Then, once the unthinkable finally occurs, any semblance of past society is almost impossible to find.

What makes Threads stand out from so many of its similarly-themed Cold War companions is the inexorable relentlessness with which it delivers its message. The nuclear attack centrepiece is a shocking collage of panic, destruction, heat, and anguish, but it is the extended aftermath of the bombing that remains searing. No film before or since has gone so far in depicting the calamitous hellscape of a post-nuclear war urban society - extending not only into the days and weeks following the attack, it continues the years and decades in to the future, illustrating the structural and biological hurdles to rebuilding civilization.

The filmmakers harness a grimy social realist aesthetic to give the film an immersive and naturalistic tone, aided by a cast of unknown actors. The narrative action is occasionally interrupted by voiceover and intertitles drily recounting facts and statistics in the manner of a newsreel, adding a broader perspective to the struggles of the film's characters while still shutting off access to the outside world.

Newly restored from original materials, Threads is a riveting, draining, and essential landmark of cinema.