I couldn’t look away from Jade. In Netflix’s devastating Adolescence, the character carries a heavy load as the only person we see who loved the murder victim. Brittle with grief, she has good reason to be contemptuous of every naive adult she encounters.
Near the end of the second episode, the bereft teenager, who is played by Fatima Bojang, enters the frame of its single continuous shot, and the camera pans along with her before she stops and stares back at her school, distraught that her best friend has been taken away. She has found herself doing what she dreaded, “walking round places Katie’s been”.
When I watched this I wasn’t aware that it served as anything other than a reminder that this girl’s “heart has been pulled out”, as the drama’s writer, Jack Thorne, puts it. In fact, the pause, as Netflix’s proud publicists revealed, doubles as the moment when the operation of Adolescence’s lone camera switches from human to drone.
After Jade moves off, it floats above roads and roofs, the aerial view giving the first geographical sense of an ordinary Yorkshire town. But this is no “look, we’ve got a drone” murder-drama emptiness: the camera is going somewhere, and so are we. We’re descending to the bouquet-strewn corner of the car park where Katie was stabbed and where the crew reclaims the camera to catch up with the bewildered heartbreak of Eddie (Stephen Graham), father of the accused. Mess this up and that’s an hour’s take gone.
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Does the seamless shot make Adolescence extra compelling? The story and the technical set-ups underpinning its telling are so enmeshed that it’s hard to isolate one element. But this is a lingering hit of a series to which the startlingly common response has been a semisurprised “I couldn’t look away”. In 2025 such a compliment seems to go against every prevailing industry wind.
Only a minute ago Netflix was being singled out as supplier-in-chief of intentionally second-screen content that won’t alarm or confuse anyone into exiting their moving wallpaper. The narrative went that it was chiefly interested in the kind of exposition-laden “visual Muzak” that flickers along out of focus while we doomscroll.
Adolescence, though more nuanced than “it was the internet that did it”, has no real twists. It is instead a twist of a show. Written and created by Thorne and Graham, the four-parter proves that Netflix can do the exact opposite of “ambient television” when it wants to, commissioning hypnotic, important drama that commands our finite attention and insists we don’t avert our eyes.
We probably still will, though. The phrase “I couldn’t look away” may not be as confounding as the review-speak concentration brag “I read it in a single sitting”, but it’s best not to take it literally. We can look away. Our screens don’t fill our field of vision. Distractions creep in at the periphery.
The same smartphone ubiquity that exposes the teens of Adolescence to a pernicious culture of online bullying and misogyny has fractured once-intact adult attention spans. In cinemas, more people are so agitated by temporary detachment from their hand appendages that they light them up anyway.
Adolescence’s one-shot, real-time approach – no cuts, no edits, just multiple hour-long takes – is a bold but logical counterstrategy. Its director, Philip Barantini, has done a “oner” before, on the 2021 film Boiling Point, also starring Graham. It’s not a trick. It’s a choice designed to ratchet up pressure-cooker intensity.
Still, for blood-pressure and budget reasons, they’re rare. The Broadway-set Birdman, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2015, was presented as if it was all one continuous shot. The trench-warfare film 1917 appears to be two long shots separated by a blackout. The theatre of war and the war of theatre seem immediate and unrelenting, but it’s an illusion: the two films hide their joins.
Adolescence, each episode a genuine example, makes us feel we are stuck in the same nightmare as its characters, which, in a way, we are.
Its technique contrasts with the first-person-point-of-view style of RaMell Ross’s film Nickel Boys, where the camera becomes the eyes of its leads Elwood and Turner, young black boys trapped in an abusive reform school in mid-1960s Florida. There’s no camera floating off here. Instead, during what Ross calls an “experiment in perception”, their perspective, and ours, is consigned to the floor.
Both methods impose limitations on the story that can be told, yet manage to be more immersive as a result. Both promote empathy in a world that too often lacks it.
Throughout the emotional wringer of Adolescence, I also couldn’t look away from Jamie, the 13-year-old murderer, who is played by Owen Cooper. His loss of innocence, so difficult to believe at first, precedes ours. Why crimes like his are perpetrated may be unknowable, but we should at least try to know. As Jade snaps at the investigating detectives, Katie “didn’t stab herself”.
