Let's start by igniting a controversy: Adolescence may not be the masterpiece you think it is.
What I understand from comments online is that you perhaps adore the British crime drama not for its story, commentary on toxic masculinity or digital-age alienation. Instead you may have been taken in by a magic trick — the audacious single-shot cinematography that holds your gaze to the screen. Like The Matrix's leather-clad spectacle masks its philosophical core, Adolescence uses technical bravado to elevate a narrative that, stripped of its gimmicks, might not have attracted you as much.
This commentary from me comes not only as a journalist but also as someone who has spent 15 years making films. And full disclosure: I'm a sucker for unbroken shots. Sam Mendes' 1917? Chef's kiss.
Form over fiction: The seduction of the single take
Cinema is a dance of illusions. Form — the structural bones of pacing, genre, and narrative — and style — the visceral pulse of camera angles, soundscapes, and performances — determine whether a story soars or flatlines.
Adolescence grabs onto style like a drowning man would a jet ski. Each episode unfolds as a single, unbroken shot, plunging viewers into the chaos of a teen murder investigation with the urgency of a live newsfeed.
Director Philip Barantini, fresh off his pressure-cooker restaurant drama Boiling Point (first a short film, then a feature, and then a series, all of — you guessed it — single takes), knows this technique's power and understands how to weaponise it.
The show's real-time chaos — police raids, school interrogations, suffocating therapy sessions — feels less like art and more like a high-wire act. You don't breathe; you marvel at the logistics.
How did they coordinate that tracking shot through the school hallway? How did the camera suddenly take to the air, fly half the town and land to deliver the perfect frame at the end of episode two? Did the actor really stumble into the camera, or was that scripted spontaneity? The series thrives on these questions, pulling a Houdini: you don't see its weaker moments beneath the sheer technical ambition.
Did you notice when the actors fumbled their lines, when they accidentally glanced at the camera, or when they talked over each other — flaws that, ironically, sell the "realness".
Masking these occasional flaws are jaw-dropping moments, such as the camera crew waltzing through scenes like invisible ninjas, actors hitting their marks to astonishing perfection, and a script that strategically doles out meaty crumbs of information to pull you into the narrative and keep you hooked. I've heard the term 'fly on the wall' used to describe it. To me, it was more like a mosquito in your ear — incessant, intimate, impossible to ignore.
So, let's be honest: if Adolescence were shot conventionally — the usual shot-reverse-shot tango — would it have captured your imagination so completely? Even with a linear flow, the single-shot technique injects a sense of urgency. It's a trick used by masters like Hitchcock (Rope), Spielberg, and even Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus).
However, one-shot films or episodes have typically been used as difficult-to-pull-off gimmicks until now. Today, technology allows the same camera that runs down the hallway to suddenly fly. And you know who the modern master of this genre is, who — it seems, can't shoot anything unless it is impossible long takes? Philip Barantini, the director of Adolescence.
Boiling Point: The genesis
In 2019, Barantini, along with Stephen Graham, made Boiling Point, a short film that was later expanded into a feature in 2021. Both films were set in a restaurant kitchen and filmed in one continuous, heart-stopping take.
The 2023 sequel, a four-episode series (also titled Boiling Point), featured four single-shot episodes, two of which were directed by, you guessed it, Barantini.
The connections run deeper. The Boiling Point team is practically the Adolescence family: Stephen Graham (co-creator, writer, executive producer, and actor), Matthew Lewis (cinematographer), Aaron May and David Ridley (composers), Hannah Walters (executive producer), and Matriarch Productions (co-owned by the married couple, Hannah and Stephen).
Adolescence isn't a sudden lightning strike of innovation — it is the culmination of years of collaboration and a refined, almost obsessive approach to filmmaking.
The synecdoche sleight-of-hand
Great art works in fragments. A brushstroke implies a storm; a line of dialogue whispers a backstory. This is synecdoche — the part standing in for the whole — and Adolescence wields it like a shield to cover its weaknesses.
When the therapist (Erin Doherty) flinches at Jamie's outrage and has to walk the dread off, we're meant to infer her own trauma with rancid masculinity, perhaps a violent husband or boyfriend at home, maybe a father. When Detective Bascombe's son decodes bullying via emojis, we're supposed to grasp the digital chasm between generations. But these moments feel less like insights and more like shortcuts.
The show's constraints — no cuts, no flashbacks — force writers to compress nuance into glances and half-sentences. Hence, when Bascombe bonds abruptly with his son over Instagram slang in episode two, it doesn't seem earned; it's a necessity.
The single-shot format demands linear progression and can sideline character depth. In contrast is Sam Mendes' 1917, where the one-take structure is necessary to show the two protagonists' relentless journey. Here, it feels like a decoration at times, sleight of hand at others.
The Matrix paradox: Style as subversion
The Matrix seduced us with bullet-time fights before hitting us with philosophical depths: stop-trying-to-hit-me-and-hit-me. Adolescence does the same, luring us with its technical razzle-dazzle to smuggle in critiques of modern boyhood clashing with the perils of 21st-century parenthood.
Jamie's descent into violence — triggered by cyberbullying and incel rhetoric — are these important themes given due importance by Barantini's camera, prowling as it does like a restless ghost? Do the show's "bold storytelling' choices leave us with lesser depth than we could have had with other techniques?
The reasoning for its flaws — stumbled lines, actors glancing at the lens — are forgiven as "authenticity". But should authenticity require excuses? And is it that the single-take format exposes the question no one is asking: was there a better way to tell the same story?
Bollywood's hollow applause
Did you notice the elephant in the screening room — the question everyone's asking: why can’t India produce something like this?
Anurag Kashyap has earned his rant. His filmography drips with audacity. But the rest? Spare us the performative angst.
The industry's obsession with "paisa vasool" spectacle trumps patience for innovation and stands in stark contrast to Barantini's risky bet on raw realism.
Consider the math: Adolescence required months of rehearsal, military-grade coordination, and actors willing to endure 20-minute takes for a fleeting scene. Bollywood's "big names" rarely commit to a fourth take, let alone twenty. Tantrums over shooting schedules, demands for multiple vanity vans, star entourages, and a fetish for formulaic scripts plague the industry. Stars cry, "Why don't we make content like this?" while starring in another remake.
The truth is uglier: Adolescence mirrors Bollywood's own adolescence — an industry clinging to safe tropes while pretending to mature. Where's the patience for rehearsals? The hunger to collaborate, as Barantini's team did, with cinematographers and assistant directors who've honed their craft over years?
Indian cinema's potential is throttled by profit margins and egos. As someone who knows a lot of them, let me tell you that every talented director and screenwriter in India is sitting on a pile of "revolutionary ideas" that'll never see the light of the projector because stars won't risk their 'brand', and producers won't greenlight the ideas because they think the "system" does not "allow" it or feel audiences are too dumb to understand.
Could there be a world where Bollywood stars trade sweaty gym selfies for perspiring script workshops? Where producers fund a Boiling Point-esque drama set in a Mumbai slum, shot in one take, starring newcomers hungry for the craft (remember the feverish one shot climax of Lijo Jose Pellissery's brilliant Angamaly Diaries?) Or will the industry be perennially buried beneath endorsements and box-office guarantees, stuck in its own matrix of ambition and recycled tropes?
Adolescence doesn't give any closure. But there's indeed a quiet reckoning— a realisation that the truth, the drive towards understanding, is messy, unscripted, and remains unresolved. Bollywood could begin by funding not bigger budgets but bolder choices. Not necessarily stars but enthusiastic storytellers. The answers to Bollywood's freeze-frame on flops won't come from boardrooms or red carpets, but the cracks between takes — in the sweat-soaked, unglamorous trenches where cinema still dares to be alive.
Let me conclude by resolving the controversy I initiated, my personal experiment in form and style: Adolescence is indeed the masterpiece you think it is. What I understand from comments online is that some may adore it for its magic trick — the audacious single-shot cinematography that holds the viewer's gaze — but its story, its commentary on toxic masculinity, digital-age alienation and critique of manosphere, does hit home.
Shows like this are few and far between, and the more there are, the merrier.
So here's to you Philip Barantini and Stephen Graham, and more from your BGOTCU: the Barantini-Graham One-Take Cinematic Universe.
