Streaming on: Netflix
Episodes viewed: 4 of 4
Following their collaboration on Boiling Point, Stephen Graham and director Philip Barantini have reunited for another tense four-parter. Like the film that series was based on, each episode of this new show is shot in one long, continuous take. But instead of screaming bloody murder at pots and pans and unfortunate staff, Graham and Jack Thorne’s script deals with an actual murder, one that tears the local community apart.
The first episode picks up in medias res: introducing us to the Miller family as police arrest their youngest child, Jamie. Easy answers are hard to come by, but clues as to what really happened are organically threaded throughout the four episodes, set days and then months apart across various locations. Each unfolds like a play, homing in on the different people involved as they contend with the murder in real time, facing toxic masculinity, police incompetence and a failing education system.
It's heavy stuff, as befits the death of a child, but Graham and Thorne (who has built an impressive portfolio of social-realist dramas on television, most recently Toxic Town) don't soften the blow. There’s even room for surprise moments of levity, which ground and humanise the proceedings, without undermining the horror at hand.
The way Adolescence is shot doesn't detract from that horror either. Far from it. The way Barantini’s camera carefully intertwines with the wider narrative, flowing between different characters without pause, is nothing short of extraordinary, and the same can be said for everyone's acting.
Graham plays a walking bruise of a man, a father broken by his self-perceived failures, while Ashley Walters brings warmth to the investigating officer who arrested his son. Yet it's Episode 3 that will stay with you most, as Erin Doherty's psychologist battles it out with Jamie in a disturbing two-hander where Cooper astounds as much as she does. Well, either that or Episode 4's gut-punch of an ending, which bookends this tragedy in the house where it all began after a boy's rage reached boiling point.