Adolescence–A Parent’s Heartbreak

In this four-episode Netflix mini-series, Adolescence is a crime drama focusing on how the arrest of a thirteen-year old boy for murder affects his family and classmates.   In the first episode a British SWAT team abruptly invades a working class home and ransacks the house before handcuffing the boy and taking him in a squad car to the police station.  The entire booking and interview process chronicles the minor’s terror and the parents’ helplessness as they passively witness his crying and pleading with police.

The Miller family does not understand their legal rights.  Jamie (the astonishing newcomer Owen Cooper) is baffled and begs to be released.  His parents (Stephen Graham and  Christine Tremarco) and sister (Amelie Pease) are stunned by the pending doom and chaos about to descend on their lives.  A particularly unsettling body search of the boy is conducted while the father stands by powerless and flinching.  

Each episode is  a disturbing  journey through the criminal process,  placing an intolerable emotional weight on both Jamie and his parents.  Accused of murdering a classmate, Katie, in  a vicious stabbing, the baby-faced Jamie is required to be psychologically evaluated by two professionals.  The first evaluation is off-screen and the viewer does not know the results of the investigation.  

The second evaluation (episode three) is perhaps the most gut-wrenching and toxic.  After seven months in juvenile detention, a woman psychologist (Erin Doherty), has to complete a pre-trial report for the judge.  The fact that she is a woman is essential to her independent evaluation.  “Trying to understand your understanding” of the charges,  the psychologist pierces the teenage boy’s world of “incel” and “the manosphere” (even mentioning the name Andrew Tate).   She unflinchingly asks Jamie’s  perspective on women, on his definition of  masculinity, on friendship, and on truth. Even the secret teenage coding of emojis is explored, with the devastating consequences of cyberbullying through online posts.  

Adolescence is like no other recent film or mini-series this reviewer has ever seen. Quasi–documentary in tone, Adolescence captures the way teenagers interact,  making this drama hauntingly realistic.  In addition, the one-shot cinematography evokes a stage play, with little change of scenery, creating a darkroom for the soul.  

Adolescence is not really a crime thriller in the conventional whodunit structure.  More a psychological study of the aftermath and collateral damage on the accused’s family,  the raw conversational style acknowledges the parental doubts anyone would experience in this nightmare situation.  Every parent’s worst nightmare is nothing short of brutal, evoked especially in the final scene.

What Adolescence also contributes to the film canon is its awareness of how teenagers, technology, and media are potentially a high-risk interweaving  in a dangerous and mostly invisible subculture, hidden in plain sight for adults and vulnerable adolescents alike.  

The fifteen-year old Owen Cooper is nothing less than astonishing as Jamie, a lacerating, seemingly effortless  performance switching into  both charming and frightening, sad and unsettling in paroxysms of  rage.   Erin Doherty, as the psychologist, gives an unforgettable portrayal of a psychologist bearing the weight of determining a young boy’s fate. And Stephen Graham (who also co-wrote the screenplay) as the sorrowful father full of unexpressed regret  and unresolved pain is deeply moving. Adolescence is a portrait of a parent’s heartbreak and profoundly difficult to watch.

Availability:  Netflix