Erik Adams
The Netflix miniseries Adolescence is probably best classified as a drama, with some of the mystery and suspense elements of a police procedural. No one would file it under “horror.” Except that… maybe they should?
If nothing else, it begins with a moment straight out of a nightmare. A half-dozen armed, armored British police officers barge into a nice suburban home and start barking orders. They drag a 13-year-old named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) out of his bed, leaving the parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Mandy (Christine Tremarco), confused and panicked. It seems that Jamie, a sweet-looking youngster, has been accused of murdering a classmate named Katie. Later, at the police station, Eddie – named as his son’s legally appointed “appropriate adult” – watches as the mortified teen gets strip-searched and then interrogated. Thanks to the novel presentation devised by co-writers Graham and Jack Thorne and director Philip Barantini, we watch it all play out in real time, in one continuous shot that steeps us in the dread and confusion of the Millers’ harrowing new reality.
Because by the end of the first episode, a new nightmare swamps the old one. What if Jamie is guilty? What if Eddie raised a child capable of stabbing a teenage girl seven times? Adolescence is less concerned with who killed Katie than it is with examining – with more sorrow than scorn – the sick souls of today’s youth. Each of its four episodes is incredibly intense, pushing us to question any assumptions we have about the crime and who’s responsible. Graham and Thorne sketch out a vision of a world where adults barely register in the lives of young people, who instead scrutinize and bully each other incessantly, online and in person. This miniseries is, quite frequently, terrifying.
It also has one heck of a gimmick. Each episode covers roughly one hour in the lives of the people involved with the case. Episode one deals with the arrest and the initial interrogation. Episode two takes place two days later, as two detectives, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) question Jamie’s classmates. In the third episode, set seven months later, Jamie is at a juvenile detention center, having a tense conversation with a social worker, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), about how his attitudes toward women have been shaped by misogynistic online influencers. And in the fourth and final episode, set on Eddie’s 50th birthday, the parents try to have a nice, normal morning, but keep getting gutting reminders of what their child is capable of.
Though neither the material nor the technique are new ground for Adolescence’s creative team – Graham has spent most of his formidable career playing tightly wound, angry men, in projects like the Thorne-written youth-culture chronicle This Is England and Barantini’s previous real-time/one-shot experiment, Boiling Point – there are downsides to telling a story this way. Because each of these four episodes only documents a sliver of the characters’ lives, a good chunk of the dialogue is spent on info-dumping, making sure we know who everybody is and are up to speed on everything that happened off-screen. There’s a bluntness to the way people talk in Adolescence. Graham and Thorne have some big themes they want to explore, about how navigating childhood today is both trickier and more dangerous than it was 30 or 40 years before the internet age. And given how tightly constructed each episode is, the characters often just say outright what’s on their mind, so they can get the point across before the credits roll.
The upside to staging everything in one continuous shot? Each episode is absolutely riveting, and is graced with performances that have time to develop and shift right in front of our eyes – like a piece of live theater. Cooper in particular is a real casting coup. As Jamie, he holds his own in scenes with powerhouse actors like Graham and Doherty, shifting unnervingly easily between looking like a scared little boy and swaggering like a fledgling “manosphere”-pilled bro.
More than anything though, what makes the “you are there” approach work so well in Adolescence is that it gets us to experience a shocking tragedy through the eyes of each of the main characters, often as they themselves are processing it. We’re with Jamie as he navigates the grim realities of the police station. We’re with the detectives Bascombe and Frank as they become depressed and discouraged by the gray lifelessness of Jamie and Katie’s school. We’re with Briony as she tries to coax Jamie into describing what a 13-year-old understands about sexuality and gender roles. And we’re with Eddie, as he wrestles with whether or not he’s been a good father.
Graham, Thorne and Barantini play a lot with subjectivity throughout this series, by muting the dialogue at times – to reflect how the characters have become too overwhelmed by what’s happening to process it – or by having people describe in precise terms what they’re sensing and feeling. (DS Frank sums up the institutional hell of Jamie’s school by telling DI Bascombe it smells like “vomit, cabbage, and masturbation.”) Primarily, what they’re doing is taking a huge social crisis and breaking it down to small, comprehensible moments, lived through by sympathetic individuals. They’re doing what Eddie’s therapist encourages him to do whenever the pain of Jamie’s alleged crime cuts him too deep: He’s supposed to “solve the problem of today,” not to obsess over yesterday or worry about tomorrow. And yet the reality of what happened keeps creeping in, like a shadow. Like Adolescence itself, the darkness is chilling.
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