ADOLESCENCE ★★★★★

Adolescence is staggering. You feel like the ground has shifted beneath you watching this four-part Netflix series, which documents with harrowing emotional and technical detail the circumstances surrounding a 13-year-old British boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who is arrested and accused of stabbing a female schoolmate to death. The show is less about the who than the why. Each episode grapples with how this tearful child, dropped into an adult world and pleading that they’re innocent, ended up at this nightmarish point. There are few comforts to this modern classic. It’s all the better for it.

Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in the four-part drama Adolescence.

Created and written by Jack Thorne (Toxic Town) and the actor Stephen Graham (A Thousand Blows), who plays Jamie’s plumber dad, Eddie, each episode of Adolescence was filmed in a single take. There are no cuts, which means no pause. Everything accumulates. Director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis keep the camera moving, searching, and querying as they capture an hour of real-time. It is wildly complicated choreography but never showy. The counterbalance is unaffected dialogue and naturalistic performances.

From the moment a Yorkshire police SWAT team crash the Miller household and arrests Jamie at gunpoint, there is a risk of making do with that old current affairs cliche: every parent’s worst nightmare. But the procedural elements, following Jamie and the arresting detectives, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), to the local police station, root out any cheap sentimentality. The first episode is horrifying but mundane. Everyone keeps ending a sentence with, “OK?” No one is OK.

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller and Christine Tremarco as Manda Miller in Adolescence.

Spread over 13 months, the episodes track the adults trying to make sense of Jamie and his generation. The detectives, who feel like miserable aliens trying to secure evidence at Jamie’s school, give way to the psychologist, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), assigned to subsequently write an assessment of this boy. The pair’s final session comprises the third episode, and it is a riveting meeting of professional experience and personal upheaval as Ariston gets at Jamie’s beliefs about himself and women, which have been distorted by misogynistic internet culture.

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There are minute flaws: using a children’s choir at one point overdoes it, a hint of contrivance to the second episode’s narrative. But as four hours of television, this is comprehensive and remarkable. It is painfully authentic, whether in capturing the legal system at work or watching Eddie and Jamie’s mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco), struggle for moments of happiness amidst the family’s trauma. It’s a deeply intimate story that resonates with a troubling cultural moment, and the performances are compelling. You’re left with more questions than answers. Please keep asking them. That’s what Adolescence deserves.

Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix.