Philip Barantini

In the opening interrogation of Adolescence (2025), a question has to be heard and an answer waited for. Philip Barantini allows no cut to ease the strain of watching a child being questioned. We were frightened by the questioning because there was no brief escape into another scene. Cinematographer Matthew Lewis makes the continuity oppressive, yet leaves us watching the people rather than admiring the difficulty of keeping the camera running.

His first feature, the crime thriller Villain (2020), came before the breakthrough of Boiling Point (2021). For the latter, he drew on a decade spent working as a chef and directed the action in one continuous take. The Boiling Point series (2023) extended the film into television. With Adolescence, he applied the single-take approach to each of four episodes, making sustained attention to people under stress the basis of a whole series.

Barantini's recurring collaboration with Stephen Graham matters as much as the technique. In Adolescence, Graham and fellow writer Jack Thorne use the accusation against a child to examine the pressures on boys and how little adults may understand them. That is difficult material to keep from becoming a lecture, and the programme sometimes explains its concerns too insistently. Barantini's direction keeps attention on the distress of the people involved, even when the dialogue becomes too instructive. The performances give us good reason to stay through the discomfort.

The risk is that a long take becomes a test we watch the crew pass rather than a scene we feel. Adolescence largely avoids that trap because waiting for an answer is itself uncomfortable; the camera does not have to invent an extra source of tension. We would not want every subject treated this way, and technical difficulty alone would not persuade us to stay. Start with Adolescence, but leave it for an evening when discomfort is welcome.