“Over-civilisation and barbarism,” G. K. Chesterton wrote, “are within an inch of each other.”

The collapse from one extreme into the other is the drama of “Lord of the Flies,” a masterful new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 debut novel. Put to film in 1990 (and before that in 1963), the novel now receives a four-episode production from the BBC, allowing for a more sprawling, meditative and gripping journey into the heart of darkness. 

The story follows a group of young English boys—“biguns” as old as 12, and “littluns” as young as 6—who find themselves stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash. Every adult, they come to realize, is dead; the group has to fend for itself. But the struggle for food and shelter proves to be the least of their worries. In short order, complex power dynamics begin to play out. What should the boys be doing, and why? Says who? 

Ralph—a benevolent, natural-born leader—struggles to maintain some semblance of civility. To his right is Piggy, the consummate outsider. He is short and stocky, wears glasses and has an Irish brogue. To his left is Jack, the consummate insider: He is tall, blond and brash, rallying his fellow choir boys to his side. Ralph understands the impulses of each—Piggy with his insistence on law and order (“Right’s right!”), and Jack with his drive to cut loose and have fun (“Boring!”)—but increasingly struggles to keep the two together. 

As for what comes next, Yeats is appropriate: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Divisions lead to tribes, tribalism to violence, and violence to mounting horrors—and gathering flies. It’s a veritable descent not only into barbarity but into death and hell. “Lord of the flies,” after all, is nothing but the literal translation of the Hebrew Beelzebub. And at the heart of it all is a mysterious “beast” that the petrified littluns have detected in the woods at night.

Though Golding’s story has become well worn by familiarity, the filmmakers approach it with fresh eyes. The camerawork is daring, the editing creative (especially the gradual increase of infrared color reversal), and the lush cinematography some of the most impressive you’ll see outside of a Terrence Malick film. (Indeed, the last scene shares a song with “The Tree of Life.”) Interspersed shots of predation in the wild—an eagle taking up a fish in its talons, a horde of ants slowly attacking a dying, wriggling caterpillar—concretize a slow, suffocating descent into a state of nature. One can even overlook the occasional intrusion of obvious CGI—a minor flaw in a cinematic experience reminiscent of both “Apocalypse Now” and “Apocalypto.”

The four-hour time frame also allows for a more subtle, complex exploration of exactly how things fall apart—and why. The disputes and infractions start small: We watch one boy’s face as he throws rocks near two littluns from afar, tormenting them with fear at the sound—out of boredom, sadism or both. When Jack and Piggy chase a pig into a thicket, the former loses his nerve before he can kill it, and when Piggy calls him out on this, the self-proclaimed hunter makes of him an easy scapegoat: It was Piggy’s fault, of course, not his. 

The savagery is not instantaneous but gradual—a little “fun” here, some blame-game and name-calling there—but these little waves, with little force, soon become a deluge, the very watery chaos out of which the beast emerges. And the resulting brutality is all too human. “People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty,” Dostoevsky wrote, “but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.”

And we see how this victimization—what Augustine called the libido dominandi, the “lust to dominate”—does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it is rooted in the very society the boys left behind. This is clearest in the case of Jack. The tough exterior is a front for a small, timid soul; and that insecurity, we see in a flashback, is fed by a deeper loneliness and lovelessness. Hurt people, as the adage goes, hurt people.   

Most striking of all, in this adaptation, is the prominent role played by religion. Jack and his choristers arrive on the beach singing the Kyrie Eleison. When Piggy reveals his real name as Nicholas, he makes reference to St. Nicholas and his patronage. And the discovery of a dead body of one of the adults leads to a discussion of whether a “Christian burial” is appropriate or not. 

Religion especially comes to the fore in the arc of Simon, Jack’s fellow choir boy—a taciturn, “batty” boy subject to fainting spells. Simon, present at the same discovery of the body, leads the boys in a prayer, asking God that they one day be reunited as one family in eternity. It is a crucial moment, because whereas Ralph and Piggy add in an “Amen,” Jack stares into the abyss—and says nothing. The forgetting of the old ways has already begun; Jack’s lips might sing the Kyrie, but his heart is far from God.  

This contrast between the two is further sharpened in a flashback. The boys are in choir, singing the Sanctus, when Simon gazes over at a crucifix on the wall and vaguely smiles. Jack, meanwhile, casts a sidelong glance at his friend. The small distance between them in choir becomes a great chasm on the island. Simon’s life takes on the very cruciform shape that haunts him, whereas Jack, seized by megalomania, gathers his own quasi-pagan tribe about him, instructing the boys to “do the dance” and whipping them into bloodthirsty frenzies. Their sacred rite is to “kill the beast,” but what was once a vague threat “out there” becomes the other boys—accidentally at first, but consciously in the end.  

As phenomenal as this new “Lord of the Flies” is, Golding’s story has been given a disappointing read by the series writer, Jack Thorne. “This is not about who we are when we’re at our essence,” Thorne told Esquire. “It’s about a group of kids that come with a culture and a socialization that they then reenact on the island.” In other words, it’s not humanity that is evil but civilization. 

However much Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have approved, this reading is flatly contradicted by the last page of Golding’s book. “Ralph weeps for the end of innocence,” he writes, and for “the darkness of man’s heart.” And it undercuts the moral force of the whole adaptation—particularly the powerful final episode. Jack’s unraveling is clearly a conscious rejection of the society that has wounded him, while Ralph and Piggy’s steadfast integrity is a conservation of what is best in it: the moral law, respect for the dignity of every individual—even common courtesy. (Piggy, almost to a comical degree, never lets go of his “pleases” and “sorrys” with Ralph.) And that civility is rooted, ultimately, in the biblical worldview, from the creation of every person in the imago Dei to Christ’s “new commandment.” 

The traditional reading is far more sensible—and, amid our struggle with digital tribalism, more edifying. “Lord of the Flies” is an allegory of human disorder and depravity—in a word, what the Christian tradition has called the “fall.” In fact, what the filmmakers’ distinct emphasis on family and society might show—despite their own intentions—is just how deep that fall goes. Evil is not just personal and individual; it is social and structural as well. There is no innocent public just as surely as there is no “private” sin. 

But correlation is not causation, and the true cause runs deeper, into the human heart itself. Though made in the image of God, we are also, as Scripture is at pains to insist, corrupted. And it all begins within: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). “It is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mk 7:19). The true heart of darkness is our own, under the sway of the true beast. Apart from God’s grace, we are, as Auden wrote, “children afraid of the night, who have never been happy or good.”  

Indeed, we are these children on this island. The portraiture of the boys’ faces—all shapes, sizes and races—holds a mirror up to our own. We fancy ourselves sophisticated adults—but as Bishop Erik Varden wrote, quoting an experienced confessor, “There are no adults, only children.” And we imagine our world to be thoroughly mapped out and explained—but we are all castaways in the cosmos. 

Will we embody the best of our civilization—or yield, little by little, to savagery? Will we fly to the Lord of light—or alight on the lord of flies? 

Matthew Becklo is the publishing director for Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. His first book, The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And, was released in 2025.