Adolescence

 Adolescence is a four-part limited series broadcast on Netflix in mid-March 2025.  The show is extremely harrowing with many disturbing features; it's the sort of thing you watch with admiration, but, also, watch the time elapsed as each episode progresses, hoping for the thing to end.  The plot is simple and there is not much narrative in the series.  Adolescence explores four aspects of a killing -- a 13 or 14 year old girl has been stabbed to death by a male classmate.  This situation is viewed from several perspectives with each hour-long episode proceeding in real time -- that is, the length of the episode matches the length of time elapsed in that part of the story.  Furthermore, the individual episodes are each filmed in a single continuous shot.  The subject matter is so gripping and the performances so remarkable that most viewers won't really notice the fantastically complex choreography required to keep the camera perpetually moving without edits during the hour dramatized on screen.  It suffices to say that the show can be watched abstractly as a bravura tour de force of camera work.  However, the subject matter is so alarming that most viewers will simply ignore the gratuitous artistry with which this show is made.  The effect of single-shot mise-en-scene is to confine the viewers within the claustrophobic perspective advanced during each episode -- we are immersed in a stream of action from which there is no escape and no diversion.  The show feels claustrophobic and its effects seem inevitable -- the camera defining what we see in a single real-time shot establishes that the tragedy unfolding is somehow predestined and inescapable.  The parameters of the presentation, accordingly, force us into a confrontation with the show's fundamental theme:  what is the cause of the murder?  What were the factors that had to combine to produce this specific, highly distinct tragedy.  The single-shot technique imposes a sort of laser focus on this question --  in most movies, there is off-screen space that is either menacing or a refuge from the narrative.  In Adolescence, the one-shot sequences abolish the notion of other spaces -- we see what it is preordained for us to see and this claustrophobic aspect of the film controls our ideas about why a little boy (the assailant is small and timid-looking) would repeatedly stab a girl in his class.  In essence, the show argues that, given the hellscape in which this narrative is set, there really can be no other outcome -- but the exact causal chain and the weight we are to afford to its links remains highly problematic and questionable.  As in all classic tragedy, the burden of Adolescence was that this killing was somehow inevitable and could not be averted.  And, yet, the characters, it seems, protest this sense of predestination -- they fight against the very constraints of the mise-en-scene in which they are embedded like entomological specimens.

The first episode is a designed as a police procedural.  We see an army of police cars roaring into a suburban neighborhood at dawn.  A dozen heavily armed SWAT team cops bust into a house and haul out a trembling child, Jamie, the 13-year old son of  blue collar parents, Eddie and Amanda Miller.  Jamie is terrified and wets himself when he is yanked out of his bed.  The parents protest in vain.  The platoon of cops takes the child to the station where he is booked and, then, interviewed by a male and female investigator (who also participated in the raid.)  A public defender is appointed for the boy and the child is aggressively interviewed by the investigators.  A girl of about the same age has been stabbed to death, cut seven times by a kitchen knife.  Jamie denies knowing anything about the murder.  However, he (and his father defined legally as "his appropriate adult") are shown a video in which CCTV shows what appears to be Jamie murdering the girl.  Jamie keeps crying out that "it isn't me," but it seems pretty obvious that he is the assailant.  He and his father collapse in griefstricken horror -- Jamie's father is shocked and appalled by what his son has done and, initially, repels his son's embrace, but, of course, loves him still and the two of them are frozen in a huddle of horror and stunned grief as the episode ends.

In the second episode, the male and female investigators go to the school that Jamie attended and where he apparently had some sort of relationship with the victim.  The school is an inferno of inept teachers, vicious bullying kids, and cruelty.  The teachers seem to have last control over the inmates.  The male investigator's work is complicated by the fact that his own son attends this place and is, also, being bullied.  The intricate camera choreography in this part of the film is astonishing -- the moving camera tracks through windows and walls, follows an extended foot chase, and, then, goes airborne for a drone shot that returns the camera to where it first started -- at a memorial shrine for the dead girl about six blocks from the school.  This sequence involves the most difficult problems imaginable with respect to the single-shot process, particularly with respect to marshalling the large forces that appear on screen -- there must be a dozen or so feckless teachers and a couple hundred students (in fact 375 extras the internet tells me).  The extreme delicacy and tact that the film displays is on evidence in the final moments of this section.  The camera comes back to flowers and teddy bears at the site where the girl was killed, but, instead of focusing on the picture of the dead child (which is the image with which the program began) instead shows us the anguish on the face of Jamie's father who is delivering a bouquet of flowers to the shrine -- there's no need to show us the little girl again; we can read the horror of the situation on Eddie's face.

A young woman employed as a psychotherapist interviews Jamie at the so-called Correctional Facility where he is detained awaiting trial.  In the third episode, seven months have now passed since the murder.  The young woman is bright and pretends to be sympathetic to Jamie but, in fact, it seems that she has an ideological agenda -- she is trying to establish that Jamie's crime was the consequence of what we would call "toxic masculinity" and, possibly, the result of indifference or worse by Jamie's father.  Jamie maintains that he didn't commit the crime and defends his father but it's apparent that he harbors a deep and disturbing reservoir of misogynistic hatred and rage.  In the end, the shrink elicits a terrifying outburst from Jamie who tries to intimidate her with threats of violence.  Then, she cooly and brutally withdraws her sympathy from the boy having seen what she came to see (query:  to what extent did she trigger an avoidable outburst by her manipulative questioning?)  After Jamie has threatened her and decried the video of the killing as "fake news", he is hauled away and young woman is nauseated, gagging as she looks at a pickle and cheese sandwich she brought for Jamie in order to win his trust.  The psychological evaluator seems horrified by what she has done just as she is appalled by Jamie's crime.  By this point, we learn that the victim of the stabbing sent Jamie text messsages with emojis that the investigators didn't understand at first.  Jamie apparently asked the girl out on a date.  She turned him down with cruel pictograms suggesting that he was an "incel" -- that is, involuntary celibate too ugly and clumsy to date.  (The girl sent out semi-nude pictures to a boy that she liked that have been circulating at the school; Jamie opportunistically thought that her discomfiture and humiliation would cause her to agree to their date.)  A motif in the show is a slogan 80 - 20, a figure that argues that 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of the population of young men -- this means, in effect, that someone like Jamie has no chance of sexual success.

13 months have passed since the killing.  In the fourth episode, it's Eddie's birthday and his wife and daughter try to cheer him up.  The program shows that, even in the most dire situations, people will revert to their mundane lives.  A therapist has told Eddie and Amanda to regard each day as "a problem to be solved."  But, after a promising start to the day (Eddie and Amanda flirting), things go badly wrong.  A vandal has sprayed the word "NONCE" on Eddie's van -- "Nonce" means "sexual deviant."  Eddie and his family go to a British version of a Home Depot store where Eddie is recognized and a store-clerk, in whispers, offers to support his son by "crowd-funding" his defense -- there is widespread sympathy for Jamie as an "incel" victim of teenage girl bullying, support that seems to appall Eddie.. One of the vandals appears and Eddie violently confronts him, then, pitches a bucket of paint at his beloved van to obscure the insulting words on its side.  On the way home, Jamie telephones to wish his father happy birthday, but, also, says that he is going to plead guilty to the crime to avoid the trial that is imminent.  Back at the house, Eddie and Amanda sit in Jamie's room and discuss whether they are to blame for what happened.  They both assure one another that the murder was not their fault, but that they "made him (Jamie)" and logic doesn't persuade Eddie, at least, that he isn't to blame for the tragedy.  The show ends with Eddie tucking a toy bear into his son's bed and kissing it as he says that he's sorry.

Adolescence asks the viewer to assess why Jamie murdered his victim.  Various hypotheses are advanced but none are really sufficient.  Jamie's school is a nightmare -- an American viewer feels considerable schadenfreude at the show's depiction of British education which seems, if anything, even worse than our schools.  (England has a long, venerable tradition of savage bullying in its public schools.)  The internet and its blandishments have corrupted Jamies' understanding of himself and  others. The murder victim has mocked him with exquisite cruelty.  There are issues of "toxic masculinity" and, even, misogyny in the situation.  Maybe, it was just fate or genetics or some kind of cosmic accident.  Or, perhaps, Jamie's parents are to blame in some respect.  All of these hypotheses are suggested (as well as others), but none of them seem adequate to account for the tragedy, an event so gruesome and bizarre that Jamie refuses to admit that he is the assailant.  Stephen Graham, a well-known British actor, is superb as Eddie Miller; he looks brutish and talks tough but we can see that he's doing his best with his family (in one monologue, he admits that he never wanted children.)  Owen Cooper's performance as Jamie is jaw-dropping -- the kid is small for his age (the actor was 15 when the show was made) and he looks pre-pubescent.  It's impossible to imagine him killing the girl, but, in the third episode, Jamie shows an alarming streak of rage as he tries to manipulate the young woman who is interviewing him.  Cooper makes the murder seem both wholly implausible and, also, totally plausible at the same time.  In the third episode, a continuous shot taking place in a room where the psychologist (Erin Doherty) interview Jamie, I found myself wondering:  if this is kid is so accomplished at age 15 what will he be like when he is thirty?  It's a pitch-perfect, eerily flawless performance.  Philip Barantini directed brilliantly; the series is produced by Stephen Graham and Brad Pitt among others.