'Adolescence' and the limits of oners

All the episodes in this breakout series are single, continuous takes. It's an eye-catching decision, but does it aid the storytelling?

- Uday Bhatia

One thing that separates the casual film-watcher from the more obsessive sort is how quickly they realise they're in a oner. For those whose life is cinema, the absence of cutting jumps out because they're so attuned to where a cut would normally occur, where the camera would stop moving. Even before they register it as a one-take, they feel it in their bones.

Adolescence is a four-episode series about a shocking tragedy involving students at an English public school. A 13-year-old, Katie, is stabbed on a street at night; the prime suspect is Jamie (Owen Cooper), a boy in her class. Before long, he's charged with her murder. The series takes us through the investigation and the aftermath, told through several points of view: Jamie's classmates, the police, the psychologist tasked with giving an assessment of Jamie, the boy himself, and, in the heartbreaking final episode, his sister (Amélie Pease) and parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco).

Released on 13 March on Netflix, Adolescence quickly became a word-of-mouth hit. A lot of the discourse surrounding it has been about the devastating effects of the "manosphere" on young male minds (you can read Shrabonti Bagchi's eyeopening piece published in March last year in Lounge about the movement in India). In this piece, though, I'd like to focus on the decision by the show's creators, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, and director Philip Barantini to present each episode as a single continuous shot.

The obvious reason to try this, despite all the difficulty it entails, is that it's a clutter-breaker, a way to keep the show from moving out of the Netflix carousel and getting lost. This is, after all, a kitchen sink drama with only one recognisable face in Graham. It's bleak and upsetting, but the constant movement of camera, actors and setting makes it kinetic at the same time.