Netflix’s Adolescence begins with a terrifying police raid on a suburban family home. A 13-year-old schoolboy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is dragged down to the police station while his shellshocked parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), follow close behind. We’ve been trained by crime shows and TV tropes to suspect that we’re being primed for some clever twist—that there’s some greater mystery at play. And then the police present a piece of concrete evidence that instantly demolishes any potential for uncertainty about how the incident went down or what part Jamie played in it.
Co-created by Graham and Jack Thorne, Adolescence continues to make the most unexpected choices in each of the three episodes that follow, and in every case it’s richer and more interesting for it. By immediately answering the question of what happened, it clears space to ask the more pressing, complicated, and unsettling question of why.
In the second episode, it seems as if the series is about to settle into a more conventional crime procedural mode as detectives Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) work their way through Jamie’s school, interviewing various pupils. The third episode then leaps forward several months and is spent almost entirely in a single room, as a captive Jamie is interviewed by psychiatrist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty). Then, Adolescence leaps forward even further for an unusually quiet finale, free as it is of shocking twists or revelations, leaving the prisons and police stations behind to focus on Eddie, Manda, and their daughter, Lisa (Amélie Pease), as they try to rebuild a life together inside their fractured home.
Director Philip Barantini shoots each of the four episodes as a single take, just as he did in his previous collaboration with Graham, the 2021 film Boiling Point. It’s easy to be skeptical about elaborate “oners,” which can often be self-indulgent feats of filmmaking athleticism, but it’s a tool that’s powerfully deployed in Adolescence. The lack of cuts means that we follow the characters through all the dead spaces in between the big, dramatic moments—like Jamie’s car ride to the police station and the detectives’ journey through the school’s corridors. We’re forced to stay in the moment with the characters, to feel the seconds tick by with them and experience the awful way life rolls on even after something utterly life-shattering has occurred.
In the first episode, the oner also emphasizes the strange dissonance agitating the people on either side of the criminal investigation. Whenever the camera bobs back toward the Millers, the atmosphere is all tension and panic. But when it moves back onto the officers processing Jamie, filling out his paperwork and fetching him cereal, everything feels almost disturbingly routine. For the Miller clan, this is the worst day of their lives. For everyone else, it’s Tuesday.
This collision of the tragic and the mundane is at the core of Adolescence. Each episode carefully explores another facet of Jamie’s life, the camera weaving through the unremarkable terrain of his existence to try and figure out where things went wrong for him. Viewers get the picture of an underfunded school where bullying runs amok and an online sphere where boys like Jamie can have all their worst ideas about life (and especially about women) endlessly echoed back to them. But we never get away from the fact that, for the most part, Jamie’s life was no different than that of any of the other kid he goes to school with.
In one of the most heartbreaking scenes in a series that consists of little but heartbreak, Eddie and Manda try to figure out what they did wrong as parents. The answers they come up with—like the possibility that they gave Jamie too much unfiltered access to the internet—seem true but hopelessly insufficient. In the third episode, Jamie and Briony play a cat-and-mouse game as she tries to coax out his true feelings about subjects like women and masculinity while his demeanor swings wildly between that of a little boy and a furious, violent man.
At no point does Adolescence pretend to have landed on a single, solid answer about why boys like Jamie exist, where all their rage comes from, or why so much of it seems to be directed at women. It simply makes us sit with the awful uncertainty of it all.
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Although not the parent’s fault, it (to me) forces or perhaps emphasises the realisation that as parents we could understand our kids more if given the opportunity to learn what goes on in our child’s mind. There are in fact hints within the episodes where there are suggestions that there is an attempt to undo the beatings that the father received from his own father although perhaps, unsuccesfully.
I couldn’t get past the mother and father constantly touching their faces, wiping their eyes, runny noses, not using a tissue and putting their hands in their hair and touching each other as well their daughter. Just gross…