How the One-Take Approach of “Adolescence” Traps Us in Tragedy

It’s so easy to get cynical about the vaunted “oner.” A staple of 21st-century film and television these days, the ambitious one-shot sequence is, at its best, a massive logistical feat in which a host of actors, cinematographers, cast and crew members, and visual effects artists build an impressively streamlined series of events playing out in real time. But as the oner has grown more feasible in recent years (particularly with the advent of special effects, which makes it easier to “stitch” different segments together to artificially simulate a longer shot), eagle-eyed viewers have grown jaded about them. What, exactly, are they contributing to the story? What is it about this chase sequence or that kitchen-sink argument that benefits from zero cuts?

“Adolescence,” Netflix’s stunning new limited series, puts the utility of these exercises front and center, not just containing but comprised entirely of some of the most elegantly realized and purposeful one-take shots to grace the medium. Here, the one-take format isn’t meant merely to show off (though, as this Twitter thread indicates, the effort required to pull off these hour-long, one-take episodes is worth its plaudits).

But here, the format impacts the structure of the show as well: “Adolescence” is shown to us entirely in long-take, so writers Jack Thorne (“His Dark Materials”) and Stephen Graham (who also stars) must build the show around those takes. No cutting between locations, no creative shaping of performances through editing. Everything must take place in real time. The results are more than just for show; they keep us immersed in the panic and grief and confusion of our characters.

As such, its story takes the form of four different slices of time surrounding a potent personal tragedy: A London family reeling from the accusation that their 13-year-old son, Jamie (newcomer Owen Cooper), has murdered one of his female classmates the night prior. Its opening minutes feel like the classic case typically made for a one-take sequence, as the police raid the Millers’ suburban home; the camera follows the police, raiding room after room, breezing past each shocked family member and keeping us in the claustrophobic panic of the moment.

But even after the SWAT team tag and bag a weeping Jamie, who’s wet himself from fear, and set him off for the station, the camera remains on his confused, terrified face. The adrenaline has worn off, and director Philip Barantini (who cut his teeth on the one-take format with his pulse-pounding restaurant drama “Boiling Point”) simply wishes us to linger in our questions: What is happening? What could poor Jamie have done? And what is going to happen to his family?

The first two are answered pretty quickly, as “Adolescence” steers us toward the end of the first hour, after a barrage of slow, methodical procedures to interrogate Jamie and to keep his family apprised of events. Eventually, Jamie’s dad, Eddie (Graham), is shown surveillance camera footage that shows, pretty unequivocally, Jamie stabbing his classmate, Katie, with a kitchen knife. Suddenly, the terror and fear we felt for Jamie in the minutes preceding it—the camera unblinkingly ushering a child through the cold, passionless business of police detention and questioning—grows ever more complicated. We realize that, even as the camera has been trained on Jamie for a good long time, we, like the adults around him, don’t understand him. We don’t know him, or why he’s done this. The camera looks, but it cannot see.

Granted, “Adolescence” gestures at an explanation for Jamie’s behavior, teasing that he’s fallen into the kind of red-pill online manosphere and incel culture that so many young men have beamed into their underdeveloped cerebellums by YouTube algorithms and social media feeds. The second episode, which takes place at Jamie’s school three days hence, sees DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and his partner DS Frank (Faye Marsay) asking teachers, administrators, and students what’s going on.

The one-take approach remains, even more ambitiously floating through the school as it if were a warzone. We glimpse little conflicts and breakdowns of social order by peeking into classrooms and around hallways; it’s clear that the melodrama Jamie’s family experiences is being writ large in a host of other kids just like him. “You’re not reading what they’re doing,” Bascombe’s son, a fellow student, tells him late in the episode. Barantini’s camera, like the detective, has been meticulously scanning each face in the school looking for accountability. But the answer lies in their phones—the hidden-to-adults language of colored heart emojis and the lingo of Andrew Tate-pilled 4channers. Even if your camera doesn’t blink, or cut, it can still miss the truth sitting right under your nose.

When it can capture that truth, it holds on it with remarkable immediacy. The show’s third episode, rightfully considered the series’ best, holds on a tense two-hander between Jamie (now changed by seven months in juvenile detention) and psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) in preparation for his upcoming trial. It’s logistically less ambitious than the prior episode—which featured dozens of extras, a larger setting, and a jaw-dropping switch to a drone shot at the end without missing a step. But this is the kind of exchange the one-take format seems classically designed for: floating between two people as they simply have a conversation, switching between participants as they hold the power in the moment.

The best one-takes function like theater, and Episode 3 does that nicely: Doherty and Cooper allow the camera to see every naturalistic twitch and gesture of their performance, the camera floating and gliding around them to home in on moments of focus we’d normally decide for ourselves if this were on stage. The lack of cuts, rather than feeling like a flourish, forces us to hold on the surface tension of their interactions and the ambiguity therein. Jamie’s responses to Briony’s questions float between bewilderment, curiosity, and anger, Barantini’s unblinking eye revealing the tempestuous nature of adolescent development.

There are no cutaways or inserts to distract us from the discomfort on display: just two people in a room, each with their own goals (Briony wants answers; Jamie floats between wanting to protect himself and impress an adult woman he clearly finds attractive). The lack of cutting leaves no barriers in front of the audience. There’s nothing to hide from.

It’s in “Adolescence”‘s final episode that you can see the flip side of the oner’s utility: To keep its characters trapped with their own emotions. Set over a year after the incident, Episode 4 probes the remaining Miller family’s attempts to move on from Jamie’s imprisonment: It’s Eddie’s birthday, one now plagued by the social stain Jamie’s crime has placed on them. He awakes to find vandalizers have spraypainted “nonce” (British slang for pedophile) on his work van, and he spends most of the hour trying, Lady Macbeth-like, to find something to scrub out that damned spot. All the while, he tries to keep a happy face for his wife (Christine Tremarco) and daughter (Amélie Pease), who want nothing more than to give Eddie a brief moment of peace, even as questions linger among all of them about what more they could have done to prevent Jamie from turning into what he became.

Here, the focus is all on Graham, the camera holding on his perplexed, pained eyes, or following his hulking shoulders (the actor still has the muscle he packed on for “A Thousand Blows“) as he walks through a home improvement shop looking for paint. Even there, he sees no escape, as a young employee recognizes him and alludes to a movement rallying behind Jamie (“If you crowdfund [a good lawyer], lots of us would get behind it”). His tragedy is a trap no matter where he turns, and the thrill of Barantini’s one-take approach is that we feel that claustrophobia along with him.

Tragedy never lets us go. It never offers us a respite, no matter how much (or how little) we brought it on ourselves. “Adolescence” allows us to see that grand tragedy play out over four agonizing slices of real time, opening up new dimensions to grief and anger and consternation that traditional filmmaking would far too easily protect us from. Here, we have no choice but to experience it right alongside our characters, as they float from calm to furious, frustration to despair, all over the course of sixty minutes.

More than a gimmick, there’s something elemental about “Adolescence”‘s one-take intimacy that feels more authentic than the curated emotional beats film can assemble of a character’s lived experience. Barantini pulls our eyelids open and forces us to see what happens when the Internet radicalizes our kids, and how parents cope when even the most well-intentioned guidance isn’t enough. How those of us left behind have to find ways to dust ourselves off, throw on that new polo shirt our spouse bought us last year, and just keep going. After all, time marches on, inexorably, one unbroken second after another.