Steven Graham
Adolescence
Well, I had to watch it!, didn’t I? Everyone’s talking about it … government ministers, schools, debating forums, all exploring its potential. Serious issues, conveyed through a clever script and amazing acting; important messages brought into the open, made accessible through fiction … exactly my bag.
Yep, I’m talking about the psychological crime drama, Adolescence, created by Steven Graham and Jack Thorne. Although it might have all the grim overtones of an actual true case/documentary, it’s neither of those things. It’s fiction; but fiction, inspired by the real life horror stories that too often nowadays bombard us through our screens and newspapers.
Told in four episodes, Adolescence features a 13-year old boy, Jamie Miller, (played by Owen Cooper) who’s arrested for the murder of a teenage girl at his school, Katie. From the outset we’re precipitated into the world of violent crime with a convoy of police vehicles approaching a house in the early hours of the morning, battering down the door, turning the rooms upside down, pointing guns at the family inside, and taking a lad barely into his teens into custody.
He’s such a young adolescent too: voice, facial features, skinny arms, nervous habits, fear of needles, all those of a child, and his repeated declarations of innocence convincingly match his looks. What father wouldn’t believe him? But the police have reason to doubt his story and before long Jamie is duly being processed by officers, lawyers, health care professionals, progressing from being alone in a dry police cell to a psychiatric detention centre.
The effect on the professionals of dealing with a juvenile is beautifully captured, from the arresting Detective Inspector, himself the father of a lad at the same school, to the psychologist, assigned to establish what kind of a person Jamie is prior to trial, who’s alone in a room with him listening to harrowing information and witnessing bouts of violent reaction. It falls to her to persist in spite of intimidation, to explore why Jamie thinks he’s so ugly not even the most desperate of girls will go out with him (at 13!); and to unravel the meaning of a range of emojis posted on his online platforms by the murdered girl. Does he even understand the permanence of death? There’s a very real sense given that everyone investigating the case is mystified by this cruel undercover world that is destroying the peace of mind of so many young people..
And then there’s the family – and every time a teenager is convicted of a major crime my thoughts always fly to the family of the perpetrator, whose lives are ripped apart mercilessly from the moment their child is arrested. In this case Jamie has parents and a sister, and we are given a tiny glimpse into their torment grappling with the unfolding horrors and the reaction of other people. Steven Graham himself plays the father and is superb at every stage, whether it’s being lost and bewildered in the police station initially, or doing his best to maintain a semblance of normality in the family, or going ballistic when youths taunt him and deface his van. But perhaps the most moving moments come when he is faced with the knowledge that his son has been exposed to toxic influences online, the dark world of misogyny and online radicalisation and the incel culture. His heart-rending words to his wife are wrung from the depths of his soul. His own father had beaten him as a child; ‘I wanted to be better … But am I?’ Together they agonise over the question: Should they, could they, have done more?
Extraordinarily each episode was shot in one continuous take –- what a challenge for the actors, especially the teenager playing the main role! Reviewers have spoken of the realism and immediacy created in this way, but I confess such niceties eluded me.
For me personally, the challenges went beyond the obvious questions relating to online corruption and the effects of bullying and cancelling, and relate to the use of this film. Would I wish this shocking footage to be shown to my children or grandchildren at a tender age? The uncontrolled behaviour of the school-children, the foul language, the violence, the images? But I accept that I’m of a different vintage, I’ve led a relatively sheltered life, though inevitably I’m becoming increasingly conscious of a very different reality today: pernicious influences are reaching our young people in the privacy of their own bedrooms and technological devices, with terrible consequences evident to us all. Something clearly must be done. The school teachers, police, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and indeed parents of today are far better placed than I to know what needs to be done to shock society into action. Is this film the wake-up call we all need? It has certainly precipitated the debate.