What is the point of one shot? In film and television, cinematographers will often show off their prowess by using as few cuts as possible. These shots are undeniably impressive, with actors having to treat their on-camera work as though it were onstage, to say nothing of weaving in and around one another as sets, rooms, and circumstances change in an instant. All of which is to say the one-take can get a little one-note. Perhaps that’s why it’s so refreshing to see Netflix’s new crime drama Adolescence push the form beyond the rigorous stress and into emotional territory not often explored in one-shot takes.
The high stress of executing the “oner” needs to mirror the tone of the scenes — or the complete films and episodes — themselves, so the one-take formula is typically used to exaggerate tense circumstances. That’s not to say all are like that, but increasingly, this is the one formal trick that makes any scene more stressful than it ought to be, with the audience distracted and left wondering if the show can really pull it off. In Adolescence, the four-episode limited series created by His Dark Materials’s Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also stars), 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering one of his classmates, and each episode was filmed in a single take — a process explored in this Twitter thread — from a scene as straightforward as two characters speaking in a row to some complicated aerial drone magic. Graham, who plays Jamie’s father, was quite familiar with this format, having starred in Boiling Point, a feature-length one-shot film about a chef, as well as its spinoff TV series (made in a few shots but not many). While Boiling Point might have pushed the possibilities for just how manic a single take could be, Adolescence opts to use the technique for a greater range of emotional realities. Rather than each episode being filled with heart-pounding action, the series establishes itself with a frantic, stressful raid on Jamie’s house and his subsequent arrest, then dissolves into a crime show that’s much more meticulous and robust beyond the thrills at the top.
The second episode is set at Jamie’s high school, where the local detectives arrive to talk to the students in hopes of getting a lead on the murder weapon. The mystery of “Did Jamie do it?” appears at end of the first episode, but the second becomes more concerned with the environment that might have fostered such violence long before the crime was ever committed. The shot zooms in and around the school, popping into classrooms and bearing witness to the fraying social order and sanity within it. Rather than use a lone shot to compound time, Thorne and Graham, working with cinematographer Matthew Lewis, broaden the show’s scope to examine the ways young people communicate — or, as Thorne puts it, it’s “not a whodunit, but a why-dunit.”
Adolescence sinks into the tragedy of a young boy radicalized and a young girl killed and lets the one-take trick explore the depths of understanding and grief, especially in episode three, arguably the best of the series. Rather than move the audience from pillar to post, Thorne and Graham clear the stage for long, unbroken conversations between Jamie and psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) ahead of his trial.
What remains so potent about the third and fourth episodes — about Jamie’s dad, Eddie, trying to celebrate his birthday as his son’s trial nears — is that they don’t follow a clear emotional line because grief and processing it aren’t necessarily linear. These episodes are less action driven and more homebound with characters crying and laughing and trying and failing to understand what happened. When Jamie and Briony discuss his feelings about men and women, the boy’s behavior moves wildly between embarrassment and aggression. His mood swings are frightening and inexplicable, revealing a central truth about Jamie that is difficult for both Briony and the audience to sit with. This is a very different boy from the one we saw only two episodes ago (albeit seven months earlier in the show’s timeline). The sensation of the one-shot doesn’t build tension during these last two episodes so much as it shows how life is often composed of contradictions. An hour can contain a multitude of sensations: You can go from laughing to fearing for your life as Briony briefly does during her chat with Jamie. While a number of one-takes are about either setting a stage or building stress, these wallow in Adolescence’s central questions about how and why someone so young could do something so awful. Sitting with that discomfort is a more intense experience than the trapeze act of most television one-take feats — these characters can’t walk away from their situation, and neither can the viewer. The compressed sense of time bonds what is real and what isn’t.
Part of what feels remarkable about Adolescence’s one-take trick is that, by the end of the show, the mastery of the technique doesn’t come through as a thing to be impressed by as much as one that simply sustains the energy of a singular episode. The choreography of the shots during a “normal day” in Jamie’s life is undoubtedly impressive, but Graham’s performance, alongside those of Christina Temarco and Amélie Pease, who play Eddie’s wife and daughter, sits in the dismay and confusion that often settle in the aftermath of an inexplicable event. They don’t understand how this happened to their son — and we don’t necessarily see the full extent of it either — but knowing is not the point. In a landscape where so many shows foreground reveals and plots, Adolescence centers an emotional reality, one that can’t be cut around or spliced to create something coherent or streamlined. Sometimes, one hour can feel miserable, boring, intense, bizarre, overwhelming, frightening, or some combination of those. Adolescence can show all of that without blinking.
