In the Flesh: Adolescence (2025)

Stephen Graham manages to make “Eat your cornflakes” sound like a doctor giving a five-year-old’s parent their child’s cancer diagnosis before clearing his throat and saying it again in a tone of forced cheer. It’s fitting. His world is over. His teenage son is a murderer, a girl is dead, and his family has been stretched to the breaking point by guilt, horror, and outside pressure. Adolescence has perhaps the clearest line of anything I’ve seen on the particular ways in which school-aged children disgust and terrify adults, react inappropriately to violence, retreat into the refuge of sullen, dull-eyed disobedience whenever the world isn’t doing what they want. Ryan (Kaine Davis) has the gawky, brash physicality of a young man, but a few words out of his mouth and it’s immediately apparent he’s a child. “I just want everything back the way it was,” he tells Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) dully after a panicked footrace. 

Like everything on Adolescence, the footrace is accomplished in a single take, as is each episode, a technique used not so much to flex director Philip Barantini’s obvious chops as to leave you stewing in the horror of what Jaime has done and the pain of everyone trying to pick up the pieces. We languish in institutional settings, wander through hostile neighborhoods, sit devastated in the quiet rooms of the Miller’s home. At no point are we given any kind of release or escape from the shockwaves of grief and anger shaking the community. The second episode, set almost entirely in the school Jaime attended before his arrest, feels like a tour of a house fire as we follow DI Bascombe and Sgt. Inspector Misha Frank (the wonderful Faye Marsay) through their wrongheaded interrogation of victim Katie’s classmates. Frank’s aside about the smell of schools, Bascombe’s passing comment about it feeling more like a “holding pen”, it all suggests a culture in crisis, out of touch with its children and itself, alienated from its own emotions.

None of this works without Owen Cooper’s frankly breathtaking debut performance as 13-year-old Jamie Miller. Mercurial, violent, needy, self-loathing, terrified, and self-destructive, Jamie is, well, a child. From his terror and heartbreak in the series’ first episode to his frustrated rage and desperation to be liked in his hour-long showcase alongside Erin Doherty as assessment psychologist Briony Aniston, Cooper displays an incredible skill for projecting genuinity. His vulnerability makes his misogyny-addled temper that much more horrible. “Get that through your little head!” he bellows at Briony during their session, aware that she’s probing him but not yet experienced enough to feel out exactly why. It’s a frighteningly adult thing for a child to say, a product of both his terror at his incarceration in a mental facility and his implied radicalization by online misogynist culture.

Where do children like Jamie come from? How do they take shape, and who shapes them? Everything we see of the Millers is working class normality, from Eddie’s long hours at his emergency plumbing business to Manda’s (Christine Tremarco) bright affect and gentle ribbing with her husband and daughter. No, it’s in his bedroom that Jamie’s terrible transformation took place, behind closed doors, his childhood struggles with confidence preyed upon and twisted by adult men obsessed with power, domination, and the subjugation of women. That this could happen in full view of the family unit, aided by nothing more sinister than busy parents who don’t fully understand the internet, is chilling. What’s happening to Jaime has been festering in the heart of Western culture for a long, long time, and as Eddie discovers when a teenage hardware store employee takes him aside to express breathless support for Jaime’s crime, it isn’t going away anytime soon. What do we do? Eddie doesn’t know. Neither do we.