Philip Barantini Adolescence Drama • 2025 • 3h 40m

England, Doncaster.
 The camera, relentless, follows the police as they make their violent entry: doors smashed down, faces twisted in shock, a home violated. Within these domestic walls, thirteen-year-old Jamie is dragged into a judicial nightmare. His guilt is already written before the truth is revealed. Time contracts and expands, dictated by an interrogation that seeks not answers but confirmation, in a society that needs monsters more than explanations.

The narrative structure of “Adolescence” is devoid of indulgent artifices: no mystery, no redemption, only the cold exposition of an evil that is neither exceptional nor inexplicable. The series does not build its drama around guilt or innocence but around the inevitability of tragedy. How does one arrive at murder? A question that, in a traditional crime story, would serve to uncover the culprit, here becomes the very core of the narrative: an inquiry into society, the construction of gender, and violence as a mechanism of power.

Inspired by tragic cases of femicide, “Adolescence” goes beyond a simple narrative account, delving into the decomposition of adolescence as a battleground of dark forces, where symbolic violence translates into flesh and blood. The British miniseries dismantles the structures of the thriller genre to reveal a social landscape where toxic masculinity, bullying, and digital communities are not anomalies but manifestations of a systemic logic of oppression. Its creators hope the work will be shown in Parliament and schools—a dangerous and far from naïve attempt to "illuminate the darkness" with a torch destined to be extinguished by the current of a complicit world.

Episode after episode, the series unfolds like an unstoppable descent. Even before its release on the platform, there was much buzz: another passing trend or a milestone in the representation of adolescent brutality? Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham construct a mainstream work that feeds on the horror of everyday life, stripping it of any consolatory filter.

Adolescence is an inhospitable territory, governed by codes invisible to adults. Here, pain does not manifest; it encrypts itself. Adolescent anguish, always filtered through emojis, memes, and messages incomprehensible to parents, is the ground where deformed ideologies take root: the manosphere, incel culture, digital constructs that mutate into real violence, into irreversible actions. The very language of the series is an indictment: words used as weapons, images that annihilate any possibility of moral neutrality.

The real horror of “Adolescence” is not in the act of violence itself but in its predictability. In the silence that precedes it, in an entire society’s inability to recognize the signs, in how every tragedy is quickly reduced to a statistic. The series rejects the mythology of the criminal, refusing to elevate the murderer to a genius of evil. Jamie is neither a cunning predator nor a puzzle to be solved. He is the product of a culture that has fed him hatred and alienation until he has become a cog in a system of systematic destruction.

In the final episode, Jamie’s parents embody the essence of helplessness: the harrowing doubt that they failed to see, to understand, to act. Their despair mirrors that of an entire generation of adults who either cover up or realize too late that they never wanted—or perhaps never had—the tools to decipher their children’s world.

“Adolescence” offers neither a cathartic resolution nor a reassuring moral. It is a desperate call to the inevitability of violence, to its ability to reproduce itself endlessly. It does not leave us with answers, only with an awareness: the reality surrounding us is nothing more than the reflection of our omissions.

And yet, if the extraordinary reactions to “Adolescence” stem from its supposed originality in addressing the educational crisis and generational divide, then we are facing an illusion. The adolescent world is far more tragic and inscrutable than its portrayal here and is already known to anyone willing to look beyond the surface. The series, with its four long tracking shots, merely reformulates in a mainstream fashion what has already been said and denounced by those who refuse to pretend they do not see the adolescent apocalypse.

The removal of adolescence from family and school is nothing new but rather another excuse for those who continue to depict that world in a superficial and sensationalistic manner. The show indulges in morbid voyeurism, titillating the audience’s instincts rather than offering a genuine reflection. If smartphones and social media are aggravating factors, the real issue is a society that continues to hand over to the future a tool of destruction without understanding its consequences.

Who is surprised by “Adolescence”? Who claims to be disturbed? Is there really someone only now realizing what is happening? Where have they been until now? Have they been living in Plato’s cave? The real situation is far worse: this series is nothing but a sitcom compared to reality. Suicides, violence, loneliness—the collective failure of schools, families, and institutions is the result of an economic system that reduces people to customers, sacrificing everything on the altar of profit. The smartphone, in the hands of a teenager, is a weapon of mass destruction.

The power attributed to the series is inversely proportional to the ability to observe reality. The product is overrated; the adolescent condition is underestimated.
“Adolescence” does not illuminate the darkness—it merely exploits it.