Netflix’s Adolescence (2025) is a gut-wrenching miniseries that surrounds its viewers from all sides, providing only negligible breathing spaces and dismantling foundational structures along the way. It behaves like an intruder, pervading the deepest regions of our sedimented belief systems and practices. Perhaps what makes the show unnerving and devastating is the total absence of a credible perpetrator. We are suddenly in the middle of an all-encompassing victimhood, entering, exiting and investigating the minds of identical and divergent victims. Where do we locate this discomfort then, or what precisely is the source of this searing sensation? Is it the misogynistic podcasts, the incel culture initiated by Andrew Tate, the intermittent gun violence incidents in educational institutions, the skewed hypotheses around masculinity and its feminist oppositions, or are these bipolar adolescents direct byproducts of a systemic and familial collapse?
Adolescence orbits the Miller family’s crisis as their 13-year-old son, Jamie, is arrested on suspicion of stabbing and killing his classmate, Katie. Through the four episodes of intense, claustrophobic single takes and interrogation, we plod back and forth over the murky waters of street crimes, cyberbullying, body-shaming, male fury and mental health distress. The four segments are divided into the police station’s interview room, a local Yorkshire town school, a juvenile rehabilitation facility, and the final one of the quartet, inside the Miller working van and house.
As DI Luke Bascombe (performed with fantastic restraint by Ashley Walters) strains and flounders to build a compelling case against Jamie and excavate the motive and the murder weapon, we are simultaneously thrown against Jamie’s denial and his father Eddie’s inclination toward his son’s repeated exhortations of innocence.
The audience’s quandary is poleaxed with the exposition of the video evidence where Jamie is seen following and then slashing Katie with a knife. As we plummet headlong into the familiar cavernous anatomy of school discipline and uniformity, there is an almost plangent sequence between the baffling DI Bascombe and his resilient son decoding for him the abstractions of emojis, the damaging climate of the manosphere comprising alphas, incels, and MRAs (men’s rights activists), of ‘red pills’ and the 80-20 rule (where 80% of women are attracted only to 20% of men, and one must trick the female gender somehow to get ahead in the sexual jungle). It is much later that we realize Jamie’s reasons for settling on his father as his ‘appropriate adult’ or the unwillingness to share his vulnerability with his mother and sister.
The most harrowing and disquieting fragment of this unsettling drama is the penultimate one, where Jamie’s exterior is ruptured by the court-appointed clinical psychologist, Briony. It is finally here that we enter Jamie’s troubled mind through the window cracked open by Briony’s questions on Eddie’s nature, his anger issues, Jamie’s relationship with women, his sexuality and inferiority, his understanding of power and justice, his Instagram posts and stalking of models online, and his reading of leaked pictures of naked women.
In the process, Jamie uncoils like an animal pushed into years of solitary hibernation. He swells and flows between tears and confusion, repulsion and attraction, fits of rage and tranquility, hunger and stiffness, and occasionally, elusive moments of tenderness. Like an insect under a blazing glass, Jamie confronts truths that auto-emanate from him beyond his conscious control. As Jamie counterbalances his unraveling by the psychologist with a pathetic exhibition of sudden outrage, we encounter a passionate, intelligent individual reduced to a mere casualty of circumstances that far exceed his age and comprehension.
In the final episode, as the family precariously attempts to maintain a quantum of sanity, everything falls apart but also, parallelly, arrives at an elevated and profound awareness of the situation. Eddie (Stephen Graham is a masterclass of acting here) travels between desire, celebration, stability, reminiscence, wrath, and his final act of crumbling with the crushing realisation of his inevitable inadequacies as a father.
Although Jamie’s mother and sister emerge as the stronger and more balanced individuals, we are compelled to stay in Jamie’s room and observe the breakdown and sinking of Eddie. This is the tragedy of fatherhood at its most unflinching exhibition. Eddie bears remnants of his own torturous, punishing father, and though consciously avoids any kind of violence, he is nevertheless bent on masculinising Jamie through football and boxing. Eddie’s lament and uncontrollable sobbing are a tragic reminder of the father from Force Majeure (2014), who abandoned his wife and children at the moment of an avalanche strike, and his howling in the deserted hotel alley.
Adolescence ends with an evocative sequence of Eddie protectively quilting Jamie’s teddy against the background of a space-themed wallpaper. Perhaps the young ones could be saved from such radicalisation through compassion. In these times of massive incompatibility and disagreement between generations, Adolescence is a call for action, a resonating voice over despairing days, and a reminder of the urgent need for kind listening and unflinching support.
Asijit Datta is an associate professor at Symbiosis University, Pune.
