A planeload of English schoolboysmarooned on a remote Pacific island unite to build shelter and fire. But over aperiod of time, the boys revert to a state of savagery which seems to bemotivated not by a sense of animal survival, but by a specifically human sadism.Peter Brook uses the film medium to great advantage to evoke what is trulyterrifying in William Golding's well-known parable of the beast within us:namely, that the fiend emerges in the simplicity of broad daylight, on an islandparadise, among a group of playful young boys unaware of their own cruelty. Brookelicits remarkable performances, and his focus on details of boyish expressionand gesture adds to the seeming absurdity of the fear that mountsinexorably.