Saw Adolescence
I finally took the time to watch Adolescence, a Netflix miniseries from earlier this year about a teen boy who is accused of murdering his classmate. It's a four-episode series, and each episode is presented as a "oner", with no visible cuts. This interview says that each episode really is a one-shot recording and that VFX was only used for tricks like passing the camera through a pane of glass.
In the end, the oner decision is cool but not the most impressive thing about the show by a long shot. The main thing it provides is mostly just a sense of propulsive forward motion... as well as perhaps a set of productive restrictions for where the story would go and how far each episode could travel thematically (basically: not at all). Each of the four episodes takes place over about an hour in the investigation of a murder case. An insanely childlike 13-year-old boy has been accused of killing his classmate, a girl his age whom he had an ambiguous relationship with. The rest of the show centers on adults trying to figure out what he did, why he did it, and what the relationship between these two kids actually was.
It's not much of a spoiler to say that the story ends up being about about misogynist radicalization of youth online - this was noted pretty heavily in coverage of the show and I went into it knowing that. I was also spoiled on the concept for the third episode, which contains the most astonishing child performance I've seen in my life - the actor playing the accused boy, Owen Cooper, acts opposite a woman playing a child psychologist, mostly just in a single closed room with nobody else present. It's gripping shit and it's crazy to realize that this show is the kid's debut.
It's an extremely depressing but relatively restrained story. Gore is lacking; the victim is entirely missing. It's really just about the family trying to understand their kid across the gulf of age and technology. Mostly the script made very good decisions about how to depict teenage misogyny and online radicalization. In particular, the way the story revealed these behaviors in ADULTS in the community was very apt - the final episode returns to focus on the parents, and it's full of really good choices that I think lesser shows would have failed to make.
But this all kind of falls flat in the second episode, where some pacing intended to develop the relationship between the case's lead detective and his teenage son ends up feeling like some typical cop show's headline-chaser episode about teens and social media. The episode follows adult cops as they spend a whole day in a school filled with kids - insane one-shot stuff here, it's really astonishing - chasing clues about, largely, Instagram. I think the plot here would have really benefitted from some attempt to demystify teen Instagram behavior - maybe an adult who already could understand some of the things the kids involved in the case were saying to one another would have helped make it feel less like the show was gawking at "these crazy kids". It's not helped by the fact that the "emoji language" the teens decipher for the adults is silly and unconvincing.
Otherwise I found the show pretty flawless. I do recommend it! It's a tough watch, but there's more here than a bummer. Everyone is acting their absolute butt off.