westendboy47 Posted Friday at 03:10 PM Posted Friday at 03:10 PM Unless you have living under a rock, your social media would have been bombarded by the raved reviews and insightful discourses generated by Netflix’s Adolescence. I doubt I can add much value to all the glowing reviews but you know me, not saying anything would be doing it a huge disservice. Here’s my 2-cent’s worth… This is a clinical psychological study of why a 13 year-old boy would stab his classmate, a girl, to death. If this is an American show the weapon of choice would probably be a gun. Think about a knife as the weapon of choice. You have to be really close to use it and the assailant will feel the blade going into soft tissue. You need a certain level of determination to stab someone. This is not a whodunnit, by ep3 it would be quite conclusive he did it and ep4 will completely carve it in stone. No, it’s not even a howdunnit, it’s a whydunnit. It unravels the truth not by melodrama, but by balls-to-wall narrative gut punches that will make you see the minefield a teenager has to navigate through adolescence. Oh my goodness, when did it get so hard? The thing is it’s not so easy these days for teenagers to be teenagers unlike my time. It’s a very real thing – I was teaching enrichment in a secondary school some time back and seriously, nobody cared. The indifference was skull-numbing and life-sapping, and I even had a random male student, who wasn’t in my class, shouted the f word at me because I politely told him to speak to a girl in my class after the lesson. I turned to look at the teacher sitting in my class and he averted his eyes. If their own teacher wasn’t going to step in I would be stupid to do anything. I knew what it was – a show of who is the boss and how “man” he was to everyone especially that girl. Just last night I had a meetup with a group of friends of over 40 years and we talked about the usual stuff – life, girls (I can’t believe we still do this), politics, food, the good old days when there was no internet and we talked about teenagers nowadays. One shared about how his nephew dons a mask for the majority of every day and he asked him why. It took a lot of coaxing and my friend realised the mask was a defense mechanism so he doesn’t need to converse with his peers and then it came out – he was being bullied in school. You are probably thinking WTF is this wall of words. Is this a review about Adolescenceor what? It is and it has already started. To me great shows and movies have a way of making you reflect on the truths depicted and feel how relevant they are. Whether you are an educator, a social worker, a counsellor, a police officer or a parent, you are going to feel your core and moral compass shaken. Adolescence is one of those rare shows that immediately feel bigger than what it is and makes you contemplate about how difficult it is for teenagers, in particular male teenagers, to navigated the tricky terrain of adolescence and in some instances, it can be a life and death situation. Adolescence is worthy of all the praises it has garnered and all the awards it will be grabbing at the end of the year. It is a 4-episode limited series, every episode is a different setting and a different time frame. The clarity with the storytelling is crystal, it doesn’t try to do everything like we don’t even see story from the perspective of the victim or even her family. It doesn’t try to be a debate by looking at an issue from every viewpoint. Yet, no minute of this feels redundant or excessive. You are going to feel the shame from being arrested, the indignation of a father, the shame and the suffering of the suspect’s family, the ineptitude of the educators or even the system, and the fear feel by other teenagers impacted by the act of violence. You are going to feel all of it to the bone. The writing, acting, cinematography are all top-notched. Stephen Graham, I have seen him in many movies and shows, but here he is on a different level. His silent indignation is always roiling just beneath the surface, threatening to erupt any moment and he does at one point to devastating effect. The effect it has on his family feels utterly painful and intense. To watch him is to feel a father’s anguish that he is as much to be blame as the son and to see him grappling with the magnitude of what it all means is to witness a 14.7 earthquake in slow-motion. Elsewhere, Christine Tremarco as Manda Miller is also a revelation. To see her superb turn in ep4 is to feel a mother slowly coming to terms with what her son has done and she is the glue that holds everything together. The child psychologist Briony Aristotle (a superb Erin Doherty) in ep3 is also a standout. In fact, ep3 might just be the best 52 minutes of any TV show this year. They say if you cast well the show or movie will make itself. Then casting 15 year-old Owen Cooper who has no acting experience is a helluva audacious coup. Look nowhere else than his performance in ep3 (which was the first thing the filmmaker shot) is to see the embodiment of a typical teenager who goes through a tsunami of emotions that a teenager typically displays – being friendly, self-deprecating, funny, livid, cheeky, cruel and utterly lost. You would know by now that the cinematography is all done in one take. Director Philip Barantini and Stephen Graham had experience with the one-take narrative in the excellent Boiling Point (2021), and they have up the ante with some audacious shots that are going to have you think “wait a minute. How is that possible?”. Unlike Birdman, there is no cheating here, there’s no moving the shot to a dark spot to steal a cut. But herein lies the thing, the one long take scene always feels gimmicky and calls attention to itself (think John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Ong Bak). Here, gimmicky is a word you throw out of the window after a while. The one take essentially lets you intrude into the scene and you get to feel the raw intensity of emotions as they happen. I have seen some of the making-of videos of how they did it and it is breathtaking what they have achieved. Last night, a friend said he loves watching those 45-minute an episode light shows that are entertaining and he can go to bed after that. I am not sure Adolescence qualifies as entertainment but it does something else more important. It stirs the heart, shakes your core and makes you think about the silence that engulfs a kid or the sarcasm that punctuates his speech. It makes you want to understand them better. Before it’s too late. 5/5 1
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