Series
Adolescence - NetflixOne morning in an ordinary neighborhood, the police break down the Miller family's door and climb up to 13-year-old Jamie's room to take him to the police station. He is accused of murdering a girl from his school. His parents, incredulous, go to the police station and enter an unknown spiral of lawyers, evidence, videos, photographs, silences and witnesses. The police, for their part, discover a world unknown to them:
Philip Barantinidirector of the feature film Boil (2021) and the Boiling Point (2023), directs this four-episode miniseries, which features Jack Thorne, author of Wonder (2017) y Enola Holmes (2020), and actor Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie's father Eddie. The performance as Jamie by newcomer Owen Cooper, who endows his character with innocence, immaturity and terror, expressing a grim psychological complexity, is surprising.
The miniseries has sparked much public debate, bringing to the forefront issues such as social media addiction, the detriment of social networking and the technologyand the role of parents, teachers and institutions in the digital education of minors. So much so that the UK Government has proposed its compulsory viewing in schools, while other sectors have branded the story as exaggerated and tremendist. It is good that an audiovisual work enriches the conversation in public forums, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that it is a fictional story.
It would be wrong to equate it with a journalistic report. The purpose is to tell a story, and that story entertains, works and shocks the viewer.
Its four chapters oscillate between the perspectives of Jamie, the police officers, a psychologist and the parents, offering a complex mosaic of the phenomenon. The question of why, the difficulty of explaining the motive for the murder, continually arises. As for the technical aspect, the four chapters have been shot entirely in sequence shots, in order to give more realism to the story, and to insert the viewer in a maelstrom in which the action never stops.
