Lately I’ve been reading reviews and basically obsessing over an old British TV movie called Threads. It’s about post-nuclear war life, and from what I’ve heard, it’s quite disturbing. I’ve been wondering for a while if I should go ahead and see this movie, or if it’s too disturbing for someone like me, who is young and easily upset, to watch.
If your’re talking about the program that I think you are:
I think it was disturbing at the time because of the genral atmosphere and there was very real fear of nuclear armageddon, its certainly not graphic, gory, violent or anything like that.
It was an early 1980s TV movie, low on special effects but high on the horrendous consequences of nuclear war. It focuses on the impact on families: some die instantly, some of burns and lacerations, some of radiation, some are killed by looters, some characters just disappear when the bombs hit. The nearest equivalent I’ve seen was the US film The Day After, but Threads is a lot darker (if that’s possible), focusing on the longer-term consequences of nuclear winter.
I think that the low-budget of Threads made it more realistic. Unlike The Day after, Threads was dirty. and the end was not hopeful.
It’s a disturbing film.
There were scenes in the hospital (guess I should use spoiler boxes just in case):
where they were sweeping the blood out of the stairwell.
The one scene that really got to me was:
in there ruins of a bombed-out city, there was an injured cat. For some reason, I cried and cried and cried over that cat..
Another movie on the same theme that came out close to the same time was Testament with Jane Alexander. Not nearly as graphic (all the violence and damaged happened away from the town depicted), but people started dying from fallout, and contacts far away gradually went silent.
To my mind, Testament was the superior film. But I’ve never been tempted to re-watch it.
Emotionally harrowing, both. But I’m easily harrowed.
Threads is, in fact, a very disturbing film, and, I think a very realistic one.
I’m not putting up any spoilers, but the final scene… well, I still haven’t gotten over it, and it’s been nearly twenty years since I saw it. Nothing graphic, but…
I saw Threads and was also shaken by that last scene. I will put it in a spoiler box, in case you think you can handle things but someone watching with you can’t Like Thea Logica I never forgot it.
A teenage girl who has grown up after the disaster, (her mother was pregnant when the bombs fell) has lost her mother and been impregnated by another boy about her age. She hardly knew what she was doing. No prenatal care of course. She finds a clinic and is lying in bed when a nurse brings her the swaddled child, which you never see. She takes one look at it, draws in her breath to scream, and that’s where it cuts off, no sound or anything.
Let’s just say the word gritty could have been invented for this film.