The Damned

Joseph Losey turns the Henry L. Lawrence novel “The Children of Light” (1960) into an adult sci-fi film steeped in a bleak pessimism in which all hope for the human race is duly cast aside.

Nuclear holocaust, one of the hottest topics in post-World War II sci-fi, is considered an unavoidable outcome here, making any preventive strategy a futile waste of time and resources. The goal, then, must be to develop a new form of humanity capable of adapting to the dismal future that’s in store (“To survive the destruction that is inevitably coming, we need a new kind of man“).

What we have here is a strongly didactic film, an allegorical one, imbued with social implications. To that latter point, the film takes a highly critical view of British society, delivering a sort of tirade that seems to spare no one – its targets range from the everyday violence of street gangs to the callous cynicism of those at the highest echelons of power.

It’s unsurprising then that the sun never rises in this sort of environment – love is destined to perish, while even the artist’s sensibility is seen as immoral. The characters are well-defined overall, but a couple stand out: a young Oliver Reed playing a frustrated Teddy Boy and Viveca Lindfors as a disillusioned sculptor whose works embody a desperate cry of condemnation towards an aberrant reality (“Well now, isn’t everything in life sort of unfinished, hmm?“).

A London-based Hammer Film production.