Those of you who crave a fast-paced, easily digestible thriller that jack-knifes at the speed of light and is overflowing with mind-bending conspiracy theories are advised to give a very wide berth to Netflix's sobering British hit show, Adolescence.
If, on the other hand, you rather enjoy being immobilised on the sofa with your heart ripped out, staring at the wall long after the credits have rolled into oblivion, Adolescence is your cup of tea. Although we must warn you at this stage that it is unlikely any cups of tea will be had. Any hot beverages you may have lovingly prepared will be left to turn cold on the arm of your sofa as you get ensnared in the horror of what happens when we let teens have unfettered access to social media.
Divided into four hour-long episodes and written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, Adolescence is the kick up the backside all parents need before they are about to cave to child-led propositions that involve the words "Instagram account" and "But everyone else's parents..."
The balance of probability states that not every boy with a social media account will corrode into an insecure, self-loathing, woman-hating murderous psychopath like Adolescence's Jamie Miller. But as Adolescence takes pains to illustrate, to embark on the radioactive experiment that is giving a child a computer and noise-cancelling headphones is akin to sticking a wet finger in a live socket just to see what happens. Must we really tempt fate and allow our sons to venture forth into a digital cocoon dominated by the likes of Andrew Tate's manosphere? Unless you are Tate himself reading this, it is unlikely you will need the answer spelled out.
A fly on the wall
We open with the police battering down the door of a suburban family as they arrest their thirteen-year-old son, Jamie (played to perfection by fifteen-year-old Owen Cooper in his first ever role), on suspicion of the murder of a schoolmate.
The word 'suspicion' is used very loosely here, since Jamie was careless enough to carry out his rage-induced stabbing in a parking lot in full view of a well-placed CCTV camera. Whatever the action-packed opening may lead thriller-lovers to believe, there are no deepfake conspiracies lying in wait. Despite Jamie's feeble protestations to the contrary – like a child who insists they did not eat that cupcake despite having slathered their cheeks in chocolate frosting – we are very quickly about to discover that there is next to no doubt about Jamie's guilt. This is not a whodunnit. This is not even a howdunnit. This is a whydunnit.
Director Philip Barantini opted to shoot Adolescence in one seamless take. Whilst this means that it is very tricky to get every aspect of the aftermath of murder – for example, we have no time to pay homage to the murder victim's family – this is the closest you will ever get to being a fly on the wall in a murder investigation. (A gentle caution: if you are currently battling a headache, hold off watching this show until the painkillers have kicked in. The camera never, ever, rests and you will be forced to hold an ice pack to your spinning head if you recklessly continue in your debilitated state.)
With this on-the-move camera, we then follow Jamie into the police station as he is read his rights and allocated a lawyer, with the boy choosing his father (played by the flawless Stephen Graham) to act as his 'appropriate adult'. We trail the camera into the room where Jamie's parents and older sister are being held, clinging to the fervent belief that their son could not possibly have played any part in this hellish nightmare. Their raw horror is scrawled in plain view, and you can almost believe that you are watching a documentary instead of a scripted show. The use of a soundtrack is kept to the barest of minimums. Almost against our wills, we are yanked into the same fresh hell as Jamie's family, and we cannot look away. Before the end of the episode, we – along with Jamie's father Eddie and his lawyer – are confronted with damning evidence that nobody can deny. Unfiltered anguish for the loss of innocence and the son he will never regain steals upon Eddie's face as he collapses into a well of grief.
A haunting lesson
Throughout the four episodes, one thing is patently missing: the murder victim, Katie's, family. As Barantini discovered, when you are shooting with a fly-on-the-wall one-take camera, you do not have the luxury of time to explore every tentacle of a crime like Jamie's. But this is not Katie's story, nor that of the haunted, jagged emptiness of her family's.
No, this is Jamie's story. More specifically, this is the story of how young boys' minds are molded as they are exposed online to pornography and masculine ideals, and left ill-equipped to neither harbour empathy, nor deal with rejection. As Margaret Atwood so keenly observed in an essay collection, men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them. This is the crux of Jamie's motive: at the end of the day, he could not bear that a girl he pursued could mock him.
There are no deep, dark secrets lurking in the shadows of Jamie's family life. There is no alcoholic mother, no absent father, no beneath-the-surface drug abuse in the undercurrents. Jamie is the product of a happy, loving family, whose only crime was to give him a smartphone and say yes when he asked for a computer in his room. As we – along with his psychologist – discover, before submitting to his murderous impulses in the face of rejection, Jamie spent many a night swallowed whole by the monitor and locked away in his digital world, his headphones sealing the outside world away. Where children once had the works of JK Rowling and Rick Riordan to keep them company before they slept, boys like Jamie spend their nights being bombarded with subliminal messages of toxic masculinity on social media.
The destruction Jamie's crime leaves in its wake spares no one – least of all his family. More than a year on, we see the grief anchoring them down as they attempt to navigate life with the haunting knowledge that they are not blameless. Little though they want to admit it, Jamie's parents accept that their hands-off approach to gadgets played a hand in the remorseless murderer their son became. Jamie is the villain, but falling prey as he did to masculine ideals, he is also a victim. As his father, Eddie, sobs into Jamie's teddy with the wish that he could have done better, we, too, succumb to tears. Because we know that as our boys succumb to invisible pressures, the line between us and Eddie is whisker-thin.
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