Adolescence 2025 Tv Series Review Trailer Poster

 Philip Barantini directs the four-part series about a teenager accused of murder, in which each episode unfolds in a single, continuous take.

The ultimate sign of television’s arrival as a cinematic art form may be the medium’s growing obsession with the oner, the uninterrupted single-take technique that has long been part of the visual language of big-screen auteurs.

Stars: Ashley Walters, Owen Cooper, Stephen Graham

A six-minute sequence shot was, along with the presence of Matthew McConaughey, the prestige calling card of the first season of True Detective. Shows with such a different reception as The Bear and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story have generated their most buzz from entire episodes presented in one continuous take. Jeon Woo-Sung’s wild Korean thriller Bargain raised the bar even higher by telling its story in six episodes, each shot at least resembling an oner.

In the second episode of Apple’s upcoming Hollywood satire The Studio, aptly titled “The Oner,” the studio executive played by Seth Rogen says of a particularly technically ambitious shot: “The Oner is the ultimate cinematic achievement. It’s like the perfect marriage of art and technique.”

He responds to Sal, played by Ike Barinholtz, who argues, “The audience doesn’t care about this shit.”

It might be tempting to follow Sal’s lead and review Netflix’s new legal thriller Adolescence without mentioning its central conceit, which is that each of its four episodes is shot in one continuous take by director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis.

Sure, the production process behind Adolescence is impressive, if not “unique,” ​​and occasionally jaw-dropping, but if aesthetics had overshadowed narrative, the resulting series would have been little more than a publicity stunt.

Fortunately, the camerawork mostly complements both a plot with a disturbing contemporary resonance and the human characters, played exceptionally well by the likes of Stephen Graham, Ashley Walters, Erin Doherty and spectacular newcomer Owen Cooper.

The series opens with British homicide detectives Bascombe (Walters) and Frank (Faye Marsay) leading a daring early-morning raid on the Miller home, arresting 13-year-old Jamie (Cooper) for murder as his parents (Graham and Christine Tremarco) and older sister (Amélie Pease) look on in confusion and horror.

In the first episode, the camera follows the raid, the trip to the nearby police station (thankfully) and the first interrogations, as the audience and the Miller family discover the nature of the accusation against Jamie, who constantly protests his innocence.

Subsequent episodes jump ahead days, and then weeks and months, to cover first Bascombe and Frank’s investigation, as they try to talk to other students at Jamie’s school; then the lead-up to the trial, in which Jamie is evaluated by a psychologist (Doherty); and then the lives of the Miller family. As structured by creators Graham and Jack Thorne, Adolescence keeps the tragic circumstances front and center, rather than a single protagonist or antagonist. Only Graham’s Eddie appears in more than two episodes (Jamie appears in a third), but each episode offers a fully realized hour-long arc and a different effect generated by the single-episode method (which Barantini previously used, with Graham as the star, on the restaurant drama Boiling Point).

In the first episode, Barantini creates oppressive, intentionally evasive suspense, making the audience’s yearning for explanation and accompaniment mirror the Miller family’s frustration. Rather than placing a blissful cut that allows viewers the relief of jumping from arrest to the presentation of evidence and charges, Barantini takes us through the procedural elements inflicted on Jamie: the fingerprints, the discomfort of invasive testing, the banality of an institutional breakfast of cornflakes.

In the second episode, Barantini evokes the cacophony that sometimes obscures the truth as detectives traverse the hallways, stairwells and classrooms of a school, encountering dozens of students and teachers, and even accompanying them on a chaotic fire drill. It’s easily the most striking of the four episodes, and the one that drew my attention most to the rehearsal and orchestration that went into it.

The third episode is in two parts, with Cooper and Doherty facing off in a mind game that plays out over the course of a conversation riddled with moments of anger, vulnerability and horror, taking place mostly in a single room.

Watch Adolescence 2025 Tv Series Trailer