The Day After

The Day After (1983) is Nicholas Meyer's disaster drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. In a quiet Kansas town people go about ordinary lives, while news bulletins about a US-Soviet standoff hum in the background, ignored at first.

For most of its first hour the film simply follows them. Dr. Russell Oakes (Jason Robards) heads to another hospital shift, the Dahlberg family readies a wedding, and grad student Stephen Klein (Steve Guttenberg) buries himself in books. Then the missiles fly, and within minutes the familiar world is scorched flat. What follows isn't spectacle but a cold record of survival: radiation sickness, wrecked hospitals, a society stripped of order. John Lithgow and JoBeth Williams round out the cast as people trying to make sense of a ruined map.

When it first aired on ABC, more than a hundred million Americans tuned in, and the network followed it with a live debate among scientists and politicians. That tells you how hard this one hits. It's not entertainment so much as an honest, unsettling warning worth seeing once. Stream The Day After online on iFILM.