There are two stories competing for our attention in the Netflix limited series Adolescence.
One of these offers a warning; the other bears witness. The warning is about Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a thirteen-year-old Yorkshire boy who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate named Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). This is not a whodunit but a why-did-it.
Within the first hour, we learn that the police have surveillance video of Jamie stabbing Katie to death. What the cops don’t have is a motive. Then the lead investigator, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Waters), learns that Jamie was heavily influenced by so-called “manoverse” theories (think Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro). He concludes that Jamie killed Katie in an incel rage because he believed she’d rejected his advances. This is the warning that everyone has been arguing about: Adolescence is either a five-alarm wakeup call about the dangers of red pilling, or it’s anti-male propaganda. Choose your side.
But there is another narrative hiding inside Adolescence that isn’t so confident about its conclusions, that isn’t a ready-made prop for culture-war debates.
This is the witness it bears to people whose paths cross Jamie Miller’s: the police investigators, the court-appointed psychologist, Jamie’s school friends, but most of all his family—father Eddie (Stephen Graham), mother Manda (Christine Tremarco), and older sister Lisa (Amelie Pease).
The closer we get to these people, the harder it gets to assign the convenient hero-and-villain roles that a cautionary tale demands. All we know for certain is that their pain is intensely real.
Over four tightly paced hours, Adolescence maintains this tightrope act between certainty and doubt.
Each episode is told in real time, with no cuts and few hints about what’s around the next corner. At any given moment, we’re locked into the mindset of whoever holds the screen: we know what they know and nothing else. This adds a note of Rashomon-like uncertainty to the series’s fly-on-the-wall realism.
Who deserves our sympathy? Whose judgement can we trust?
If I’d gone into Adolescence knowing nothing, I’d have had no trouble putting myself on Team Jamie for most of Episode One. You can’t help but imagine your own child, or yourself at his age, being put through this kind of trauma.
He’s woken at dawn by armed police battering down the door, dragged away and shoved into a van while his parents lie face-down, pleading for their child. Jamie is so terrified that he wets his pants. Bascombe gives him time to change, without asking why Jamie chose to sleep in his trousers. After that, the grim machinery of police procedure goes to work: Jamie is booked, advised of his rights, forced to submit to a blood draw and strip search, assigned a solicitor.
He’s told that he can choose a responsible adult to advocate for him, and he unhesitatingly picks his father.
This is how Adolescence sets us up for the sucker-punch at the end of the first episode: the moment that his father Eddie is required to watch video of his thirteen year-old son stabbing a girl to death.
We’re never alone with Jamie. He’s mostly absent from two entire episodes, and even when he is on screen there’s always someone else serving as our lens on him: the father who believes in his innocence; the nurse who promises it’ll all be over soon, even though her job is to collect evidence that ensures it will never be over; the investigators who treat Jamie with respect but are unimpressed by his tears. The motives of young murderers are often baffling, and Adolescence seems determined not to open too wide a door into Jamie’s mind. We’re discovering him through other people’s eyes, which means we can never be sure if we’re reading him right.
The film’s storytelling is perfectly suited to its deep read on the characters. Previous single-take narratives—from Hitchcock’s Rope to 1917 and Victoria—have a tendency to meander. There’s no cuts to speed the pace or break up the drift. Adolescence uses the long takes to root us in the moment, giving us no room to back off or look away. In a traditional narrative, we’d have a strong central character to lead us through the series. At first that job seems tailor-made for Detective Bascombe, but he drops out of the series halfway through. So we have to keep seeking new emotional anchors, which changes from one moment to the next. Creators Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne clearly don’t want us getting cozy.
Episode Two—the least satisfying for me—takes us into the concrete jungle of Jamie’s school, where Bascombe tries to get Jamie’s friends to open up while the teachers struggle to maintain order.
The chaos is a deliberate contrast to the controlled intensity of Episode One, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. The kids come off as soulless: hiding their own complicity, treating the death of a classmate as a welcome distraction, feeding on ghoulish speculation about Katie and Jamie. The only exception is Fatima Bojang as Jade, Katie’s best friend. Her deep rage and honest grief are a reminder that someone died, someone we will never know except as a victim. Bascombe’s colleague, Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), says as much: killers always upstage their victims. Unfortunately, the script bears this theory out. All we ever know about Katie Leonard is what led to her death.
Episode Three is where Adolescence jumps off a cliff.
Erin Doherty plays Briony Ariston, a psychologist assigned to assess Jamie’s fitness for trial. Their meeting is so tautly paced that it could be a standalone film. Ariston shows up with half a sandwich and a hot chocolate for Jamie. She may be fond of him—or she may be trying to buy his trust with food—but she seems to genuinely want to understand him.
At first, it seems that Jamie wants what she’s offering (maybe he just wants the hot chocolate), but he soon begins to change tactics. He rejects the sandwich; he makes fun of her for calling her grandfather “Pop-pop.” It sounds like ordinary smartass kid banter until you realize, holy crap, he’s negging her. Some video he watched about making a woman feel bad so that she’ll unconsciously seek his approval. He’s trying this on a psychologist. She laughs it off, a little. Then she starts asking if Jamie’s ever had sexual thoughts about the models whose pictures he posts on Instagram. Or the girls at his school. Or Katie Leonard.
Jamie’s mask slips. No longer in control, he asks Ariston if she’s allowed to ask him those questions. He evades. He tries to dominate her with rage. He melts down. He composes himself and asks for more hot chocolate.
Finally, after repeated, surgical questioning—she never loses her cool in front of him—he blurts out something that is very nearly a confession. This is when we finally see Jamie Miller as Katie must have seen him in her final moments. Not as a child, not even as a child throwing a tantrum, but as someone utterly devoid of empathy. He wants the psychologist to know that he could have raped Katie but didn’t. He believes this makes him a better person.
It’s at this moment that Ariston point-blank asks if Jamie knows what murder is and if he understands that society considers it wrong. This is literally all the court wanted her to assess: she’s seen enough and she’s done. Suddenly desperate, Jamie begs her to tell him if she likes him. She doesn’t answer, just calls for the guard to take him away. In a flawless final touch, Ariston nearly takes the uneaten sandwich with her—then pulls her hand away, as though it might sink its fangs into her.
This is first-class television—but it’s definitely that first Adolescence, the Potent Warning about Toxic Masculinity. Episode Four, centering on Jamie’s family, tacks hard from warning to witness. We are watching the Millers try to celebrate Eddie’s birthday: trying to pretend that they can still joke about whether black sausage will put him in an early grave; trying to tell stories of Mom and Dad’s first french kiss while their teenage daughter makes ew-gross faces; trying to be a family while their son is about to be tried for murder. It all falls apart because some local kids have spray-painted “nonce”—British slang for a pedophile—on the side of Eddie’s van. They’re now going to spend his birthday trying to erase that word, and they’re going to fail miserably.
The script does not suggest that Eddie abused Jamie: as we learn, Eddie deliberately tried not to raise his son with the cruelty of his own father, and both his wife and daughter clearly regard him as a loving person. The “nonce” is the work of kids, reflecting the attitude of a community that believes Jamie’s parents must have done something to make the boy turn out that way. Later, while shopping for paint to cover up the graffiti, Eddie meets a store employee who’s creepily convinced that Jamie was framed. Whether for or against Jamie, dead certainty is the medicine they’ve chosen to get through this traumatic event. The Millers don’t have that luxury.
Eddie hits his lowest moment when Jamie calls to wish his dad a happy birthday, and makes a surprise announcement that pole-axes his father.
It’s a heart-shredding scene, all the more because it keeps so much beneath the waterline. It’s also the last of Jamie’s many attempts to pull his father deeper into his private hell. Does Jamie want Eddie to be his protector? A male role model? Does he want to be punished? Whatever his reasons, it’s clear that Eddie just isn’t up to the job. From the moment he agrees to be Jamie’s responsible adult, Eddie is on a downhill slide toward a truth he can’t face. He confesses to his wife that he wishes she’d have been the one to watch the surveillance video: she’d have been able to handle it. Eddie seems a good person, but he’s ill-suited to the part of Stoic Patriarch.
Both of Adolescence’s two stories grapple with the question of why Jamie became a killer.
This is inevitable: from Columbine to last week’s headlines, whenever a young male commits murder, we have to know what “made” him do it—implying that it can only be some external force. It’s false ideas about masculinity. It’s bullying. It’s the influence of social media. It’s the availability of weapons. It’s a godless culture. It’s a violent culture. It’s the parents. It’s everything but the parents.
The first narrative of Adolescence, the warning, has a simple answer: it’s the red pilling.
And yet it’s the witness narrative that finally wins, because it doesn’t try to answer the question. Instead it leaves us with the knowledge that a rush to explain why can distract us from looking each other square in the eye. If Jamie’s parents raised a killer, then they’re bad people and we should have no sympathy. And yet clearly these are not bad people. So what do we do with them? The witness narrative suggests that we can’t heal unless we get past our easy explanations and deal with each other’s suffering. Eddie Miller believes his son is a good person, even after he can no longer doubt his son’s guilt. So how does he keep living with this impossible contradiction?
He can’t; but he has to. The end of Episode Two offers the closest thing we get to a resolution. Right on the path where Katie Leonard died, still wrapped in police tape, is an improvised memorial. A van, Eddie’s van, pulls up. He furtively places flowers for Katie.
Then he looks around, as if searching for the same surveillance camera that sealed his son’s fate. Looking to be blamed or absolved, we don’t know.
He gets back into his van and drives away. No words.
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