Adolescence on Netflix review: British crime drama fires on all cylinders

When done well, there’s nothing more exciting than two actors sitting across from each other at a table, eyes locked and in an unspoken battle of wills.

In these interrogation(-esque) scenarios, there’s a game of seduction, and we’re not talking about Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Each person wants something out of the other, and it’s just a matter of who can best the other.

You might think that when the two participants are an adult woman and a 13-year-old boy, the dynamics are unevenly matched, but in this case, the kid has more power than even he knows.

This is the set-up for the third episode of the superb British series Adolescence, which takes place almost entirely within one room. It’s a two-hander between Owen Cooper’s Jamie Miller, the boy accused of murdering a classmate, and Erin Doherty’s Briony Ariston, a psychiatrist who’s probing what Jamie understands about crime, culpability and consequences.

It’s an electric and often chilling hour of TV as it the series explores what might make a 13-year-old boy stab a girl seven times in a carpark at night. The spectre of toxic masculinity, entitlement and bullying come into play as it becomes clear, whatever of Jamie’s guilt or not-guilt, the kids are absolutely not all right.

The four-part series stands out for many reasons, but this chapter is distinctive because it pulses with intensity and social significance. Jamie is a scared kid who believes the worst about his own value, imposed on him by others and then internalised.

That then festers into something monstrous which peeks out at times in bursts of anger as he tries to dominate and belittle a woman at least twice his age and, in theory, in a position of power over him. It’s her power he bristles at, without understanding why and where those feelings come from.

Parents watching Adolescence will be terrified — and they should be — about what their own children have been exposed to and what thoughts and beliefs they have absorbed from online and peer sources.

Adolescence, the most watched-series on Netflix since its debut at the end of last week, one of the few titles that actually deserve that ranking, has attracted a lot of attention for its impressive technical feats of shooting each episode in one take but its potency lies in how it uses that craft to supercharge the story.

Each episode is structured differently and shifts its focus. The first centres on cops storming the Millers’ home and arresting Jamie while he was still in bed in his pyjamas, his hands held up against the backdrop of his galaxy wallpaper, as his panicked family — dad Eddie (Stephen Graham, who co-created and co-wrote the show), mum Manda (Christine Tremarco) and sister Lisa (Amelie Pease) — are held in various other parts of the house.

The camera follows Jamie to the police station along with detective Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), where dad Eddie rejoins them, along with another cop, Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), and a lawyer (Mark Stanley). Jamie will be charged with the murder of Katie.

The manoeuvring it takes for a camera to move between these spaces without ever breaking is mindblowing, but even more so in episode two which sees the two detectives attend Katie and Jamie’s school, a chaotic institution in which teachers seems like they’re barely coping, and often not at all, and the students are prisoners within a system that serves no one.

The production had three weeks to shoot each episode and spent the first week in rehearsals and figuring out the movements of how each character, and sometimes scores of extras, and the camera will traverse through a labyrinthine space.

Another week would be spent in technical runs and then there would be five days to actually shoot it. They would shoot two full takes a day, 10 in total. If you’re halfway through the hour and a cup is not where it’s supposed to be, which would have a Rube Goldberg-ian effect for down the line, everything would need to be reset.

Where some “one-take” productions and films such as Birdman and 1917 have previously cheated by hiding edits in a doorway or by having the camera move in and out again on someone’s back, Adolescence is a true one to the point where they had to seamlessly hand the camera over to different operators in the middle of takes because it was too much for one person.

There’s a shot at the end of episode two, after the fast-paced movements of the school, where the camera floats up and flies over several blocks to another location. When you’re watching, you can’t help but exclaim, “How the hell did they do that?”.

It’s worth checking out the behind-the-scenes featurettes if only to see the crew attach the camera, which was already filming, onto a drone to continue that aerial shot, without missing a beat. Remarkable.

Adolescence was co-created by prolific British writer Jack Thorne and Philip Barantini directed every episode, having previously worked with Graham on the one-take feature Boiling Point.

Then there are the actors, including from powerhouse actor Graham, who never misses as the dad who couldn’t even begin to fathom how his boy could possibly even be accused of killing another child. From confusion and denial to anguish and the heartbreaking questions of how he may have failed as a parent, it’s a masterclass in grounded performance.

Everyone here is immersed in their characters and this story, from Doherty’s psychiatrist and the looming realisation in those final harrowing moments of episode three, to Tremarco as Jamie’s mum, whose private pain we intrude on in breakaways, and the very effective, young Cooper, who had no professional acting experience.

Because Adolescence never lets up, there is no chance of second-screening this series. A truly memorable and compelling show.

Adolescence is streaming on Netflix