TV & film reviews - Adolescence (Philip Barantini; 2025) and Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard; 2024)

In episode three of Adolescence, the new four-part Netflix drama, a child psychologist asks the thirteen year old boy she’s assessing whether any of his ‘mates’ happen to be girls. Have all his relationships with female peers been romantic, to use a word that feels woefully old-fashioned in the context of this series, or have some of them been platonic? The boy’s response to this is confusion and, crucially, anger, as though he hadn’t even considered that a non-sexual connection with a female peer might be possible. And it is this ability to expose and examine the chasms that exist between so many sectors of contemporary society that makes Adolescence one of the most powerful works of television produced for a long time.

The boy being interviewed is Jamie (Owen Cooper) and episode one begins with his arrest for suspected murder. In a single take, we see him go from bedroom, to van, to police station, and finally to an interview that changes not just his life but that of every person connected to him. Episode two focuses on a couple of police officers investigating the murder case at Jamie’s school. Episode three is almost entirely composed of the aforementioned psychological assessment. And in episode four, we see a snapshot of a morning in the life of Jamie’s family, as they try to deal with the bomb that has unexpectedly blown up in the middle of their existence.

To say that Adolescence is an important piece of work almost feels redundant. It tackles some of the most urgent matters of our times, from knife crime, to masculinity, to social media, to the state of the education system, to the ways women have had to find methods for managing the uncontrolled emotions of men, to the far-reaching effects of punishing work schedules, and many others. But it’s far from being a simplistic polemic, almost never allowing the drama to be dominated by overt exposition or soap-box proclamations. It is thanks to the extraordinary writing talent of Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also gives a perfectly-judged performance as Jamie’s father) that everything unfolding before our eyes is character-led, which of course makes it all the more harrowing.

Cooper, Graham and Erin Doherty as the psychologist have rightly attracted a great deal of praise for their work here. But it’s also important to mention Ashley Walters as DI Bascombe, blundering through a world he doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand until his son (Amari Bacchus, utterly heart-breaking) explains there’s more to some social media posts than meets the eye. Christine Tremarco as Jamie’s mother is a study in loving patience, watching her husband trying and failing to cope with outbursts of sheer rage. And Fatima Bojang (as Jade, the victim’s best friend), with her expert balance of vulnerability, anguish and frustration, remains in the mind long after her few scenes in episode two are over. Indeed, the casting and performances are superb throughout. Having more than a little experience of the world of secondary education, I confess I was waiting for episode two to present the usual inaccuracies and cliches that are found in many school-based dramas. But I’m almost sorry to say that it was depressingly spot-on, to the point that I began to wonder if the teachers — harried, worn down, cynical — hadn’t been plucked out of a nearby comp.

Whether each episode needed to be shot as a single take is perhaps worth debating. There are moments when the cleverness of the camera work attracts excessive attention to itself (How did we just go through a wall? How come we’re now flying across a car park?) but by and large, the lack of cuts — coupled with an evocative sound design — creates a suitably claustrophobic atmosphere. This is a world from which there is no escape. The only instalment in which the technique feels heavy-handed is perhaps the third one — somewhat ironic, given that it’s almost entirely a dialogue between two people sitting in one room. As though he wasn’t quite brave enough to trust in the power of the script and performances, director Philip Barantini chose to keep the camera moving, spinning around, shifting from one performer to the next. Certainly, this provides a neat way of charting the changing power balance between Jamie and the psychologist, but a few more moments of stillness might have gone a long way.

Mind you, this is a very, very minor quibble indeed. Adolescence is the definition of a must-see, and I hope the debate it has already generated about masculinity and the upbringing of boys continues for a long time, and yields some positive outcomes. I’m not sure I remember another time when the matter has sparked a public conversation in quite the same way. It may seem strange to say this, but it is heartening that more people are now acknowledging that, when it comes to boys, we do have a problem. And of course, I don’t mean that the boys themselves are the problem. As Adolescence ably demonstrates, our boys are the product of the systems and environments and families within which they’ve grown up. And it is in these areas that the problems lie.

I’m not sure what’s going to solve them. A line being bandied about at the moment is that one reason for the current tension around this particular issue is that the political right is trying to make boys more like their fathers, whereas the left is trying to make them more like their sisters. I can see what the intended meaning of a pithy statement such as that is, but I’d say it is precisely this sort of framing that is stopping us from making progress in the situation. It’s unhelpful and reductive to say that boys would be ‘better’ if they were more like their sisters: what we should be doing is trying to teach boys that masculinity encompasses a much wider range of traits than we’ve permitted in the past. Kindness, compassion, consideration for others, the ability to control one’s anger, a willingness to show tears — these aren’t exclusively feminine qualities. And we’re doing boys a disservice by making them believe that they don’t have equal access to such traits, in much the same way that we harm girls when we try to stamp out assertiveness, leadership and competitiveness. The definition of masculinity must become broader and more human.

Amidst the bleakness of Adolescence, there is a moment of hope: a father asks his son if he fancies going somewhere to get a bite to eat. A seemingly simple question, and yet behind it lie weeks and months of miscommunication, misunderstanding and rejection. It is to their credit that Thorne and Graham never suggest that all our problems would vanish if only dads offered the occasional outing to McDonald’s. But they do make it clear that moving things in the right direction is possible. It’ll take a concerted effort (personally, I’m all for government-imposed restrictions on teenagers using smartphones), as well as honesty and time. But the clock is ticking, and as Adolescence shows, for some youngsters, it’s already too late.

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A musical about a Mexican gangster who hires a lawyer to help with gender reassignment may not have many obvious commonalities with Adolescence, but although Jacques Audiard’s controversial Emilia Perez is entirely different in tone and format (has there even been a musical where one of the songs contains the lyrics “Mammoplasty? Yes. Vaginoplasty? Yes.”) its bold handling of gender politics is not entirely dissimilar to Thorne and Graham’s. Here, the focus is on the power of reinvention. When the gangster in question achieves her wishes, life appears blissful. But it’s not long before various aspects of her past begin to haunt her, and it could be argued that her final fate is a statement on her inability to be entirely honest about her true self: an inability caused by the unforgiving world which caused her to turn to crime in the first place. This is a curious, compelling piece of work, by turns bewildering and affecting, and certainly far braver and more original than Anora, to which it lost out at the Oscars, although for my money, the most deserving film was The Brutalist anyway. If you’ve been put off by some of the reviews, as I was, then don’t be: Emilia Perez is well worth seeing and offers a distinctive take on the effects of the harms we do to each other, and the difficulties we face when we try to break free of them.

Dariush