Adolescence– When a 13-year-old is accused of murder, you get empathetic enough to think that he is not capable of doing so…
I watch a lot of thrillers and mysteries but the opening scene of Adolescence was one I never imagined. Adolescence movie is shot so that there’s no scene transition in each episode. It is shot in a way that your mind is engaged to travel with the story as it unfolds. Permit me to call it the opening scene because it is hard to classify which scene it is.
When armed cops badged into a house to catch a culprit, you expect to see a notorious drug lord or Osama Bin Laden but not the 13-year-old Jamie.
Jamie, the protagonist of the movie, continually says he has not done anything wrong. He proves an innocence that makes you believe him as a viewer such that even when there is an existence for him being a culprit, you continually wish that he was framed.
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Adolescence has just four episodes which span about an hour each with each one having an intriguing rollercoaster which seeps you in. You can feel what the actors feel because of the engaging game of the movie.
This movie exposes us to the complexity of the upcoming generation’s behavior. Most of these behaviors cause you to question what the motive could have been. Even with the motive, you find their actions unjustifiable enough. In the second episode when DI Bascombe visits Jamie’s school for an investigation with his partner, Sergeant Frank, we see the intricacies of the schooling system. It feels like teachers no longer have the gripping power of young school kids. The way the school works now is that it is either you are the bully or the bullied victim. The long scene travel exposes us to the question of whether the schooling system had more good than harm.
The third episode exposed us to who Jamie is. Maybe he did it, I think. He flares up and tries to attack his therapist exhibiting violent behaviors at 13. Jamie is smart with a kind of behavior such that he thinks his therapist might be trying to manipulate information out of him. When his shrink asks him subtle questions, he begins to lash out, all out of fear of being seen as vulnerable. He shuffles between different emotions, giving a mini Joker kind of vibe, causing us to think he might be exhibiting chaotic behavior. He is just a kid with a sophisticated behavioral complex which jeers him to be manly.
Jamie seeks compliments and does hide his feelings when his shrink does not indulge him in this. At 13, he tries to act from the overhyped manosphere such that he scares his therapist who is a female professional trying to gather information for his pretrial report. Young Miller seems to have the ideology that men are predators who need to be violent to show their stances and feelings. During his conversation with this therapist, he validated his dad’s action of pulling down a shed while he was angry. He thought it funny.
Up till the last scene we see Jamie in, he is convinced that he didn’t kill Katie, the victim. Oh boy, he makes me want to believe every time. Maybe he didn’t, his anger just did.
Jamie bears a burden of low self-esteem also accentuated by bullying from his peers. It’s funny how they could bully him with harmless emojis. The narrative of bullying has changed. A 13-year-old getting bullied for being a virgin? For not having a girlfriend? Extraordinary things are happening.
The fourth episode of Adolescence exposed us to how Jamie might have gotten his anger, his father. His father’s anger didn’t drive him to domestic violence but it was reciprocated in Jamie as an upgraded version that could drive him to murder. However, his parents still wallow in uncertainty about why he could have done it. This raises the question of how can you raise a child without passing down traumas to them. Do children replicate the behavior of their parents in upgraded versions? Why do they find it easy to pick up the bad behaviors of their wards rather than the good ones? Why do the traumas shape them negatively rather than positively? All these are rhetorical questions without satisfying explanations to date.
As much as we want to protect kids, we can not always protect kids from all the evils in the world. the world has become so porous that there are no longer secrets through the advent of technology. Adolescence creates this gripping fear in parenting, how can we train kids so that they can turn out the right way?
