'Adolescence' review: Netflix's most impressive series currently is a must-see cautionary tale
It doesn't take much time to acknowledge the enormity of the efforts that went into Netflix's new limited series Adolescence. It's one of the most impressive titles on the streamer currently, considering every one-hour-long episode was shot in a continuous take — without any stitches or CGI trickery, as revealed by the makers.
The good news — for impatient and time-constrained viewers — is it's relatively shorter (four hours) than most titles in this category. Suffice it to say, making it longer would've been unnecessary. It's a classic case of achieving a lot with very little.
But 'little' is certainly not the word I would use to describe the efforts of everyone involved, chiefly the actors who are required to be in character, evoke different kinds of emotions for the viewer, follow the camera blocking cues, maintain scene and emotional continuity, and much more throughout the hour-long duration of each episode without being offered the respite of cuts.
This means, for one, no bathroom breaks. The actors had to be fully prepared physically in a way that didn't allow anything to meddle with filming. Can we imagine that?
Multiple questions arose in my mind: How did they pull it off? How many rehearsals did they do for it? Were they able to replicate — or enhance — in the final take the work they did in the rehearsal sessions? And what about the kids, most notably, its newcomer lead Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, the 13-year-old boy accused of a female student's murder?
Right from the first episode, the viewer is placed in the thick of the action, following the cops as they break into the home of the boy's parents, apprehend their son, take him to the station, and subject him to every procedure from there on.
Adolescence is a top-variety procedural, utilising methods of many films or shows of the same ilk, but taking it a notch above. The four episodes are efficient and incisive, putting more onus on the reasons that led to the horrifying incident than on who did it.
The answer to the latter is given by the end of the first episode itself; it's through the probing of the mentality of insecure male adolescents, particularly the women-hating, Andew Tate-following toxic crowd that gathers in the red pill communities, that the show generates maximum chills.
Even more chilling is the idea — and some of us may have reflected on this in our solitary moments — that a child doesn't necessarily have to be born into an abusive and underprivileged household to develop criminal tendencies.
A child can have the most loving parents — parents who love each other, too — and still turn into a killer. The show brings up different possibilities but doesn't provide a concrete answer as to why some dreadful events happened the way they did — and I don't mean this negatively.
Long ago, I had entertained the thought of writing a script along similar lines, but I don't think I would've done a job as good as what actor Stephen Graham has co-created here with Jack Thorne.
Graham, who has grown over the years into one of the most formidable actors in showbiz, whose work in Adolescence evokes the early work of acting heavyweights like Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Daniel Day-Lewis, play the 13-year-old's father with utmost conviction.
Note the scene where his son is being strip-searched, and the camera forces us to look elsewhere, just like every other actor around Graham who does the same to make the boy more comfortable. For us, 'elsewhere' is Graham's face, a picture of extreme concern — nervous twitching, muscles tightening, quickened breathing, and so on. If I were an actor, would it have been possible for me to do all those things if I were in his place? I wondered.
Graham's character, Eddie, is not the only concerned parent here. Ashley Walters, who plays the investigating officer, Luke, is a father whose son is a student in the same school as Eddie's son. The superbly staged second episode, where we accompany Luke through the school and around it, makes a commentary on the current state of the education system, particularly the unwelcome intrusion of technology in classrooms.
"All these videos," says a disappointed Luke, who also laments the inefficiency of some teachers entrusted with putting some sense into these students when their parents are caught up with daily office troubles.
Also notable is the third episode centred on Erin Doherty's exceptional performance as the child psychologist tasked with writing a profile on Eddie's son while experiencing moments of discomfort caused by the presence of a senior officer guiding her.
When the show finally ends on a poignant note in the fourth episode, we are left with the realisation that it has just made us reflect on our own childhood, parents, the methods they adopted to bring us up, the good and bad kind of conditioning, the unhealthy patterns that we broke out of, and how some of us are glad that we weren't brought up in the age of social media when certain apps didn't warp our minds at such an early age.
But can we lay the entire blame on technology? Are parents handling their responsibilities the right way? If it's not too late, it's better to do something about it — do something more, as Luke and Eddie realise after witnessing this life-altering event.
It's a wake-up call for young parents and parents-to-be. And if you think you don't have the requisite skills to be a parent, then perhaps you should consider not being one because parenting is not... child's play.
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