How Adolescence takes on teen angst, trauma & truth

One Cut Of The Dread

The camera becomes the curious protagonist in Adolescence , the masterfully crafted new Netflix miniseries, writes Rahul Desai .

The following essay contains spoilers for Adolescence.

THE FIRST PART OF Adolescence opens with a 13-year-old boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), being arrested on suspicion of murder. It’s early morning. The family home is raided by the police; DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) take Jamie to the police station. Jamie tearfully goes through the detainment process. He is strip-searched, his father Eddie (Stephen Graham) agrees to be his ‘appropriate adult’ and a local solicitor arrives to represent Jamie. The two cops then interrogate the boy. For much of this episode, as grown-up viewers, we are wired to watch these proceedings through the lens of one question: Did he do it?

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At some level, we experience it as an investigative thriller: a murder mystery where the suspense lies in the answer. When Jamie quietly tells his dad that he is innocent, it’s hard not to believe the kid. He sounds truthful. It’s probably all a mistake and he’s protecting a wayward friend or elder. We look at the father as a portrait of complicity, too — closely judging every word, glance and gesture of his. DI Bascombe mentions a previous juvenile case where none of them noticed years of sexual abuse. But the end of the episode shows that Jamie did do it. He brutally stabbed his schoolmate Katie to death in a carpark the previous night. The cops had proof all along. His guilt was never in doubt. There is no confession. The anti-climax lies in the eyes of the beholder.

The second part of Adolescence invites us to watch proceedings through the lens of the next natural question: Wh y did Jamie do it? It features the two cops visiting his secondary school in search of the knife — and some answers. Again, we are wired to believe that there’s more to the crime. His friend, Ryan, acts shady; Katie’s friend Jade lashes out at Ryan for ‘killing’ her. There’s something in the air. A conspiracy, perhaps. DI Bascombe’s son, Adam, looks uncomfortable; maybe he’s involved as well. The students are unruly, the teachers anxious, the tensions high. Adam asks to have a private chat; Bascombe can’t wait to get to the bottom of this case.

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The third part of Adolescence features a young psychologist, Briony (Erin Doherty), trying to understand why Jamie did it. She alludes to a domestic situation, his father’s temper and masculinity, a fragile marriage, or the possibility of abuse. It’s been seven months; Briony thinks she’s close to a breakthrough. We think she’s close, too. The answer is around the corner. The fourth and final part of Adolescence features the family trying to celebrate dad Eddie’s birthday more than a year after Jamie’s arrest. The parents wonder what they did wrong. They wonder if they were so preoccupied with protecting their daughter that they automatically trusted the son to stay out of trouble. Jamie’s call from prison removes any semblance of hope or delusion about whether he did it. It’s the end of the series but the question hasn’t changed: Why did he do it?

It’s no secret that Adolescence derives its devastating impact from its craft. Each hour-long episode is a single shot without cuts — intense, fluid, real-time, snaking through spaces, dodging obstacles, and passing the baton of agency and culpability from one person to another. It’s so smooth that we barely notice this high-risk technique by the second part. The closing minute of the school episode is already etched in the annals of pop-cultural history; the camera ‘transitions’ from street level, goes into drone mode, rises and floats over the small town, landing back down at the site of Katie’s murder. A girl died, it seems to remind us, minutes after the female detective expresses her frustration at how everyone forgets the victim.

Every assistant director and crew member deserves credit for crowd control, seamless tracking and the complex blocking of these shots. But viewing this single-take element of Adolescence as a technical gimmick — as a creative decision that heightens the narrative stakes — would be doing a disservice to its storytelling. In an age of AI and advanced CGI, the execution of the trick is no longer the accomplishment. It’s the role the shot plays in the relationship between the viewer and the screen; between perspective and fiction.

In the case of Adolescence , this visual language is also its social language. The camera becomes an extension of the question coded into every episode. By staying long and unyielding, every shot seems to be searching for Jamie’s motive in broad daylight — like the audience, the cops, the psychologist, the parents. The attentive camera refuses to blink (cut) in case it misses any clues or signs. At no point does it seem like it knows the reason either; the shots remain in sync with the adults who struggle to discern the indiscernible. The single takes reflect the general conditioning, and reflect a society that’s built to seek tangible answers. They extend across locations and verbal volleys, replicating the non-stop cognisance of those trying to deconstruct Jamie’s moment of madness.

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The camera manifests our confirmation biases. It often scans Jamie’s face, getting interested every time he reveals any signs of aggression and hostility. At one point in the psychologist episode, the camera dips below the table to frame him like a menacing villain and amplify the sudden power imbalance between them. When Jamie scoffs at her mid-sentence for expecting an absolute answer, it’s almost as if he’s taunting the camera for being alert but looking in the wrong places. Minutes earlier, it followed her to the video room and depicted her discomfort around an intimidating-looking and nosy security guard; she felt unsafe with the big man but truly felt violated only by ‘little’ Jamie’s provocations. Even when dad Eddie threatens a pesky teenager for teasing the family in the last episode, the camera imitates the unsteady gaze of someone filming a potentially violent act — and ‘evidence’ — on their cell-phone. It’s like the shot is breathlessly hunting for the genes that might have been passed down from father to son. It’s hoping to validate the behavioural theories about growing up in a ‘troubled’ home. We anticipate an explosion around his wife and daughter; the rhythm of the camera keeps feeding this notion.

The answer, of course, is far more insidious. It’s imperceivable by the naked eye — and lens. The cops realise it in the school episode, and they’re surprised by the subliminal shapelessness of new-age grooming; they spend their days as detectives of the human condition, but aren’t trained to detect the continuous consequences of being human. While every adult probes around for generational cracks and conventional cues, Jamie’s radicalisation happens in the blind spots and unseen bits of living. The single-shot episodes mirror how modern-day influences — the internet, the manosphere, the incel forums, the internalised misogyny fanning the flames of online bullying — are destined to escape the parameters of parenting and surveillance. It’s as if the cinematography hints at an environment so inconspicuous — memes, peer pressure, geekdom, trolling, a leaky education system, nonchalant teachers — that we invisibilise it by pretending to keep watching. Nobody notices a problem if it’s everywhere.

Just as single takes require plenty of planning and a bit of luck, the implication is that nurturing a child in this world requires the same: planning and, more importantly, a lot of luck. A boyhood spent in front of a screen is inevitable. Sometimes the escapism results in healthy and heartwarming consequences, like in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about an isolated teenager who finds love and belonging in the realms of fantasy. But sometimes the escapism is terminal. It’s a matter of digital fate, not design. You can tell that Jamie idolises men like Andrew Tate from the way he breaks into a performative scowl or profanity-laden outburst. Jamie’s parents aren’t shown to be lacking in any aspect; they’re about as functional, dysfunctional and perceptive as anyone else. The traumas are no different either: a boy craving his father’s validation, or a man ashamed of his son’s (lack of) sports skills. And perhaps that’s what makes Adolescence — the series, but also the embattled state — a survival horror flick where the ghosts can’t be seen anymore. The camera’s curiosity and jittery ‘monitoring’ reveal an entrenched fear of the unknown. But it’s no longer a jump scare; it’s a slow-burning drip.

It also exposes the blurred lines between responsible and helicopter parenting. The series is so evocative that one can imagine an alternate four-part series running in parallel. In this series, a paranoid couple supervises and micro-manages their son’s access to technology. They control his movements and friendships. He becomes a recluse. He is made fun of in school; Katie rejects him. Pushed to the corner, he reaches the classroom one morning with a gun. He opens fire. And he saves one bullet for the CCTV camera. Either way, the consequences are eerily similar. There is no winning for the family that restricts his personality; there is no winning for a family that lets him live on his own terms.

Instead, the parallel story hiding in plain sight is one that features Jamie being a sweet son and brother at home, hanging out with his friends at school, impressing his teachers, eyeing a few girls, leaving weird comments on Instagram, then coming back home and walking into his room while the camera stops — and focuses — on the closed door. It cannot enter, but it also doesn’t want to enter. All it can do is zoom in and wait. What happens behind the door is beyond the jurisdiction of single-take questions and real-time scrutiny. It’s beyond the symptoms that unfold between unbroken shots. It’s beyond the reach of a system that perpetuates loneliness parading as privacy. And it’s beyond the frame-rate of adolescence whose voice breaks when nobody is listening.

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