Adolescence: Review
Comments Off on Adolescence: ReviewDo you remember being an adolescent? Did you wake up on your 13th birthday and feel like everything had suddenly shifted? Acne. Periods. Voice cracks. Mind racing, body changing, 13 was big. It was the year you were made painfully aware of how different girls and boys were. Suddenly, you were told to act differently around the guy you’d been sharing lunch with since kindergarten. 13 was messy: so much happening inside your head and under your skin, and absolutely no manual on how to handle any of it.
I remember the weirdness. I remember boys being loud, rude, sometimes mean, teasing girls for fun. I remember starting to feel self-conscious. But I do not remember animosity. I’ve always thought it was just awkwardness that comes along with growing up, coming to terms with ourselves and others, nothing more.
Unfortunately, 13 isn’t what it used to be anymore.
And this is what Netflix’s 4-part series is all about.
Adolescence is no murder mystery. From the very first few minutes, we know that this 13-year-old boy has killed a girl not much older than him. What’s the show about, then? you might wonder. What prompts this review? you might think. It’s about the why.
Why do men hate women?
Why do YOUNG BOYS hate girls?
How is this hate developed?
I wish we didn’t have to ask these questions. I wish we didn’t have to sit with the weight of it. I wish, on watching this show, this review and our thoughts could end at the brilliance of the craft: the staggering performances, the haunting cinematography, and the technical feat of shooting each episode in a single take. I wish we could just fixate on how Owen Cooper (Jamie) delivers a performance so raw it makes your stomach turn; his first-ever role, and somehow already one of the most chilling portrayals of a child on screen. I wish we could talk only about the eerie stillness of certain scenes, the razor-sharp pacing, the sound design that pulls you into bedrooms, classrooms, and silences you didn’t expect to sit in.
But alas, that would be a bit of a cop-out, wouldn’t it? Because this show doesn’t let you look away. It doesn’t let you retreat into aesthetics. It drags you, gently at first, then all at once, into the dark corners of the internet where kids get lost. Where a search for confidence turns into content on “alpha energy”, and before you know it, your sweet, awkward 13-year-old cousin is quoting Andrew Tate like it’s holy scripture. It sounds dramatic. But Adolescence shows you how undramatic it really is. How terrifyingly casual it is. How it’s just one video, one thread, one “harmless” joke.
Across four episodes, we watch Jamie spiral, not because he’s evil or broken, but because he’s bruised and online. And that’s what makes it hit. He’s not an outlier. He’s familiar. He’s the kid next door. He’s someone you knew. He’s someone you thought you knew. And that’s what’s haunting about the show. It doesn’t give you villains. It gives you people. Real, painfully real people. And it forces you to ask the questions you’ve been dodging: How did we let this happen? Why were we so busy laughing at the red-pillers that we didn’t notice how many kids were actually listening? Why are we still so scared of talking to boys—really talking to them—before the internet does?
“I read an incident in the paper and it was about a young boy killing a young girl, stabbing a young girl to death and then not long after that I saw on the news on the television that you know it happened again in a different, completely different part of the country and a young boy had stabbed a young girl and if I’m really honest with you, both of those incidents really hurt my heart in a way and it just made me think what’s going on…”
Creator, Executive Producer and Actor Stephen Graham speaking to Yahoo UK
The first episode starts with a brigade of police officers swarming what seems like this perfectly normal, loving family’s home. The horror is that they’re here for the boy. They think 13-year-old Jamie has killed Katie, a girl he went to school with. You don’t know the why, when, or how; all you see is this scared kid sitting alone in his room, looking completely lost. He’s peed his pants. He’s shaking. And you think, no way. It’s difficult to reconcile this image with the crime he’s accused of. Surely there’s been some mistake. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe someone’s lying. One minute, this family’s going through their usual weekday routine, breakfast and backpacks. Next, their home is being torn apart, and they watch helplessly as their little boy is being called a murderer and dragged to the police station.
By the end of the first episode, all doubts shiver and crack. There’s no speculation, no ambiguity: Jamie killed Katie. Then you see his father laying flowers where she died, while Through the Eyes of a Child, sung by the girl who plays Katie, plays in the background. And suddenly, it’s all real. A girl is dead. A boy killed her. And nothing will ever be the same.
It’s the third episode—short clips from it, I’m sure, have flooded your feed—where Jamie meets with a psychologist. We’re tossed in a brutal wave of horror and disgust. Now, with each layer being stripped away, you’re left to face the bare truth. A 13-year-old boy, bullied and isolated, pulled into the ugly corners of the internet, kills a girl simply because she didn’t like him back. And the hardest part? He probably doesn’t even fully understand what he’s done. Or maybe this is what you want to believe. That he doesn’t understand. Because that would make it all just a little less sickening.
And that’s the most concerning part: you want to blame everyone but him; society, parents, school, anyone but Jamie. You don’t hate him. You’re terrified of him. Terrified of how social media twists kids today. You’re disgusted when he tries to justify it, claiming other boys would’ve done worse. But hate? No. I hated that I couldn’t hate him. A boy who thinks so little of women that he kills a girl, and still, I can’t hate him. All I could feel was pure shock.
And you hear these stories every single day: women stalked, assaulted, raped and murdered. But you never expect that kind of rage from a teenage boy. Still lanky, still growing into his voice, still figuring out algebra, and yet filled with that much hate. You never expect the misogyny to run so deep, so young. But it does. In a world where the manosphere thrives on TikTok algorithms, where influencers spew bile dressed up as confidence and success, where boys are fed a steady diet of “alpha” nonsense, where podcasts teach that empathy is weakness and women are objects to win or punish—a digital underworld festers. Where masculinity is measured in control, cruelty, and silence; where boys are handed scripts that tell them being human is pathetic, and rejection is humiliation worth avenging. Maybe we should’ve expected it. Maybe we haven’t been paying enough attention.
And this isn’t about villainising men, because of course not all men, but it’s too many and too often. It’s about confronting a culture that’s failing them and, in turn, failing us. It’s about the quiet radicalisation happening in bedrooms behind closed doors. And it’s horrifying, not only because a girl is found dead every now and then, but because we don’t know how to stop it.
And you see the family wrestle with this, too. They know they went wrong; they just don’t know where or how. They did everything by the book: they were present, supportive, and loving. And yet, right under their roof, a boy learned how to kill. Jamie’s dad blames himself. Maybe if he hadn’t pushed him into football. Maybe if he’d shown him that gentleness is also strength. Maybe then Jamie wouldn’t have ended up here. Maybe then he’d have had a better blueprint for what it means to be a man. And that final scene, the parents collapsed in each other’s arms, grieving something they don’t have a name for, leaves you gutted. Because it asks the question no parent wants to face: how do you raise a child in a world like this? How do you keep them safe from what seeps in through the screen? From voices louder, meaner, and more convincing than yours?
Adolescence is raw, it’s intimate, and it is unflinching. It forces you to confront the discomfort, the grief, the rage, the confusion; not just of what happened, but of how easy it was for it to happen. It isn’t easy to watch, and that’s the point. So, if there’s one thing you can watch, let it be this. If there’s one thing you can ask your parents, your brother, your boyfriend, your guy friends, any man you know, to watch, let it be this. Please.
Anuva Rai