‘Adolescence’ and the limits of oners
All the episodes in this breakout series are single, continuous takes. It’s an eye-catching decision, but does it aid the storytelling?
One thing that separates the casual film watcher from the more obsessive sort is how quickly they realise they’re in a oner. For those whose life is cinema, the absence of cutting jumps out because they’re so attuned to where a cut would normally occur, where the camera would stop moving. Even before they register it as a one-take, they feel it in their bones.
Adolescence is a four-episode series about a shocking tragedy involving students at an English high school. A 13-year-old, Katie, is stabbed on a street at night; the prime suspect is Jamie (Owen Cooper), a boy in her class. Before long, he’s charged with her murder. The series takes us through the investigation and the aftermath, told through several points of view: Jamie’s classmates, the police, the psychologist tasked with giving an assessment of Jamie, the boy himself, and, in the heartbreaking final episode, his sister (Amélie Pease) and parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco).
Released on 13 March on Netflix, Adolescence quickly became a word-of-mouth hit. A lot of the discourse surrounding it has been about the devastating effects of the “manosphere" on young male minds (you can read Shrabonti Bagchi’s eye-opening piece published in March last year in Lounge about the movement in India). In this piece, though, I’d like to focus on the decision by the show’s creators, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, and director Philip Barantini to present each episode as a single continuous shot.
The obvious reason to try this, despite all the difficulty it entails, is that it’s a clutter-breaker, a way to keep the show from moving out of the Netflix carousel and getting lost. This is, after all, a kitchen sink drama with only one recognisable face in Graham. It’s bleak and upsetting, but the constant movement of camera, actors and setting makes it kinetic at the same time. The initial two episodes in particular are tremendous technical feats. In the first, the police break into Jamie’s home, arrest him and take him to the police station, followed by his frantic parents. We stay with the action the whole time, from home to car to station, without a pause.
Why do filmmakers use long, uninterrupted takes? For one, they’re a challenge, and a way for directors to show off their control and prowess, no matter that all the departments need to be working seamlessly for even a simple one-take to happen. But they also fulfil varied storytelling needs. They can be chaotic and thrilling (the incendiary opening of Athena) or sweeping and lyrical (any film by Max Ophuls) or quietly immersive. Yet, with the advance of digital shooting, editing and correction, extended one-takes became a lot more feasible—and commonplace. Instead of single-take scenes, we started seeing “films in a breath": whether genuine one-shots like Russian Ark or Victoria, or stitched together to look like one (Birdman, 1917). You increasingly see them on streaming shows as well; apart from Adolescence last month, The Studio also debuted a one-take episode. It’s still a neat trick, but one that’s lost its novelty.
A key aim of single-take scenes is to keep the audience trapped in a moment, allowing them to stick with a character or an emotion or piece of action in a more life-like fashion. But when the focus jumps characters and settings—as happens through the first, second and fourth episodes of Adolescence—the effectiveness of the uninterrupted take is hampered. If we followed Jamie through the first episode, it might have served the storytelling better. Instead, as the focus jumps from character to character and we’re led in and out of rooms, I found myself wondering about the shooting process itself, which is never a good sign. I kept imagining the directors and camera operators and actors problem-solving—we’ll be shooting from here, then you move aside and the camera will exit through that door, where it’ll follow the social worker…
The same thing happened in the second episode, which takes place a few days after the arrest, in Jamie’s school. The focus is largely on the lead detective (Ashley Walters), but the seamless nature of shooting means we shift—necessarily and, to my mind, awkwardly—from interactions between students to ones between students and teachers and then back to the cops. A pounding chase scene takes us back on to the streets; in the end, a drone shot deposits us in another part of town. It’s technically dazzling, but the nature of this aesthetic approach demands that the storytelling work to fit it, rather than the other way around.
In the third episode, though, the one-take really works. It’s built around a fraught interaction between Jamie and visiting psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty)—where we see the misogyny within the boy surface in frightening bursts. This time, the one-take keeps in the moment: we experience the session from Briony’s point of view, and the action is limited to the detention centre. With less license to roam, it’s easier to forget the camera and get wrapped up in the unfolding drama. The lack of cutting adds to a growing tension, a feeling of being stuck in the room with the frail but volatile Jamie. Cooper and Doherty are tremendous here; the sense of continuity allows the actors to grow tired, irritated and angry as two people in a fraught meeting might. I flinched when Jamie makes a fake lunge at Briony—it’s not often you see a jump scare achieved without edits.
Graham and Barantini had already collaborated on a one-take project, Boiling Point (2021), in which Graham plays a chef in a high-end restaurant on opening day. The film lasts 92 minutes and is a single continuous shot (The Bear, season 1, episode 7, is a similarly chaotic, though shorter, restaurant-set one-take). Adolescence had me thinking wistfully of the late English director Alan Clarke, a pioneer of long takes as applied to kitchen sink dramas (Graham mentioned Ken Loach’s and Clarke’s TV movies, “tough, humanistic stories about working-class people", in an interview). But Clarke’s extended takes were never distracting or longer than needed; the idea was always to service the specific emotion of the scene.
Much of this comes down to personal taste. I thought the stitched-together oners in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman felt like a gimmick to cover up a shrill, shallow film, but loved what its cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, and director Alfonso Cuarón did with long takes in Children of Men. I was suspicious of the action-filled oners in 1917 but exhilarated by those in Athena. After watching Adolescence, I started on the new Seth Rogen comedy series, The Studio (Apple TV+). The second episode is a 23-minute oner in which Rogen’s newly promoted studio head excitedly wanders a movie set getting in everyone’s way. It’s a self-aware oner; at one point Rogen invokes other one-take shots, a tribute to the Robert Altman The Player, whose uninterrupted 8-minute opening follows a studio executive as he talks about famous oners. The Studio oner is funny and apt and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It isn’t better filmmaking than Adolescence, but it might be better storytelling.
Also read: Mapping the Indian Manosphere
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