These Are the Damned

Although the cast is excellent, no one character dominates the action or overshadows the others. Joseph Losey's hand is so apparent that the film's considerable effectiveness must be accredited to him as must its few faults and the fearsome message it conveys.

Mr. Losey, proceeding with grim logic toward his apocalyptic climax, has made a strong comment about the nuclear age—while arrestingly demonstrating just how much a gifted filmmaker can accomplish with limited means.

More than an interesting curiosity, it's one of Losey's best English efforts, and Viveca Lindfors contributes a striking part as an eccentric sculptress.

One of the best British science-fiction films and one of the most controversial.

Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges with a unique stylistic flourish in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, featuring slow glides, skewed angles, standoffish perspectives, and hectic striations. These images seem adorned with quotation marks, as if Losey placed his own movie in the mediatized madness that he was criticizing.

The performances are universally weak, and Losey's clearly ambivalent attitude towards the demands of the genre ensures that the film is never exciting. But as an ambitious oddity, it exerts not a little fascination.