Philip Barantini’s four-part drama is frightening, compassionate and worth the discomfort. Its single-take filming serves the performances, though the writing can become too insistent about explaining the pressures on boys.
Adolescence is a crime drama we recommend, with a reservation about how insistently it explains some of its concerns. Writers Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne use the accusation against a child to examine the pressures around boys and the damage those pressures can do. Across four episodes, the series asks adults to consider how much of a young person’s life they actually understand. That could make for a dutiful programme about a social problem, but Philip Barantini’s direction keeps the immediate human distress difficult to set aside.
Each episode unfolds in a single take, and cinematographer Matthew Lewis makes that continuity oppressive without letting it become the only thing we notice. The opening interrogation gives the method a purpose: a question has to be heard, and the answer waited for. We were frightened by the strain of that exchange. There is no cut to offer even the smallest pause in watching a child being questioned. Barantini makes a familiar crime-drama scene uncomfortable by asking us to sit through it.
The acting is crucial to that discomfort. The performances feel unprepared in the useful sense: we cannot hear anyone aiming for the next emotional effect, even within such tightly organised filming. Adult distress feels painfully inadequate to the task of understanding what has happened. These performances give the discussion of masculinity a human urgency that the script cannot always achieve when it addresses the subject more directly.
Adam Tomlinson’s production design holds up to the prolonged attention, staying unobtrusive enough that we do not find ourselves admiring the surroundings while someone is in distress. The absence of cuts within each episode also places the work of changing pace on the actors and camera movement. Aaron May and David Ridley’s music contributes to the unease, though it is not what we remember most. The questioning supplies enough tension simply through the time it takes someone to answer.
The writing is less secure when it broadens from these encounters into an explanation of online misogyny. There are passages where Graham and Thorne seem anxious to ensure that nobody misses the lesson, and the dialogue becomes instructional. We understand the wish to make this material clear, particularly for viewers unfamiliar with the influences being discussed. But explanation starts to take time away from watching people respond.
Crime dramas often get impatient with the distress that follows an accusation. This one asks us to stay with the damage around a crime instead of treating it as something to get through before the next revelation. That patience gives the performances their force, even when the writing grows too explanatory. It carries a 15 certificate. Save it for an evening when neither of you is looking for reassurance.
