Threads [DVD]

Product Information

At 8:30 am in Britain (3:30 am in Washington, the time when Western response would be at its slowest as the President and the senior staff would be asleep), Attack Warning Red is transmitted. No CGI or over the top special effects and gore here, just honest story telling and the result is that it's actually the best (and most horrific) film I've ever seen. In the meantime, open naval warfare erupts between the American and Soviet navies in the Persian Gulf, and West Berlin is blockaded. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter .

Threads (Blu-ray Review) - The Digital Bits Threads (Blu-ray Review) - The Digital Bits

O'Connor of The New York Times wrote that the film "is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. Survivors work in cultivating crops, and children born after the war speak a broken form of English.

According to Jackson, so immersive was his experience behind the camera that “it took years to get out of my head”. The detonation causes massive structural damage to Sheffield, and an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the UK are instantly killed in the wider exchange, including Jimmy as he races to be with Ruth.

Threads (TV Movie 1984) - IMDb Threads (TV Movie 1984) - IMDb

While Hines script is incredibly powerful, Mick Jackson's direction takes the narrative and magnifies it almost exponentially thanks to the terrifying visuals. It's not the scorched baby I keep seeing, it's the woman's mad eyed stare as she cradles her dead infant.None of the cast was especially well-known at the time, though Reece Dinsdale later became a familiar face on television. Despite the background news coverage of escalating tensions with an unspecified foreign power, the viewer is lulled into thinking that nothing catastrophic can happen to derail the domesticity and turn the drama on its head. It premiered on the BBC on 23 September, 1984, which was described as “the night the country didn’t sleep”. The British director recognises himself in the painting, as a younger man – but there is something not quite right. Watching individual people be subjected to one of the most horrible things imaginable and then following whomever is left makes for a very downer of an experience, but an important one.