Threads

It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

Horrifying, moving and powerful. Watch it by yourself, late at night and never sleep again. Not a good date movie.

Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]

The British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience. [02 Mar 1985]

Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?

The darkest piece of TV the BBC has ever created is 1984's 'Threads'.SYNOPSIS: 'The effects of a nuclear holocaust on the working class city of Sheffield, England and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilization.''Threads' looks terribly dated now but overall it's probably more powerful than anything Hollywood has ever put out on this subject ****'s visceral in nature and absolutely lives it to the lore which surrounds it. For its time it was also sort of a 'what if' guide in the event of nuclear **** holds nothing back and rightly so. It's vital that the horror of a nuclear attack is shown however harrowing and shocking it ****'s not simply a powerful film, but an important one too, for it's generation and for the now.A classic which will never be repeated.9/10

Powerful, moving and tragic. This is very difficult to watch. There is this sense of doom as world events clash. This film not only shows the human cost of catastrophic nuclear attacks but also touches on rebuilding afterwards. This goes into far more detail than any similar film. There is a greater fear coming about from this kind of film than any conventional horror film. It didn't make you jump but it made you sit up and take notice. This is a very effective chiller. Probably the scariest of its type that I have seen. I didn't get how the title fitted in until the end. The factual commentary is important although still slightly annoying. I didn't sleep very well after viewing.

This is the kind of film that hype around it increases its quality for many people when in fact they're not so good and if there is something that should be stressed about Threads is that it's not a great film. Beyond its harrowing portrait on the consequences of a nuclear war and nuclear fallout the film offers very little of anything that could be called narrative. Evidently its documentary style is largely to blame for that because the film only passes from one point to another without anything sustaining it more than the consequences of the nuclear attack, there's really nothing more, the ending is the best proof because the horror stop out of the blue but it could easily go on and on. The film itself after the attack is horrible, despairing, bitter, painful and not only because the images are graphic but because they represent a very possible reality. Here you cannot finish the film and then turn on the lights knowing the disaster or the killer are just fiction. Nuclear war has always been a terrible possibility for humanity since those weapons were conceived, today it would probably be worse and in spite of everything, the teaching of the horrors that could be unchained never seem to be enough, because as we saw recently, it was downplayed to see who had the biggest button.