The Art of Unbroken Attention
Why we are all talking about Adolescence
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
The opening line of S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders is deceptively elegant. The play of sunlight and dark, light and shadow. The tug of the film left behind and the urgent matters of the present moment. Screen and street, fantasy and reality. It names the shift from the liminal space of the cinema back to the world as it is.
Cinema is visceral. It is a deeply embodied ritual. The very architecture of cinema seduces. The heavy curtains. The plush seats. The velvet. The hazy glow of exit signs. We are drawn into a shared darkness, the hush of possibility, and the willing suspension of disbelief.
And now, with streaming platforms producing cinema-quality content that we can watch in our own homes, this threshold experience is no longer confined to the theatre. It is in the intimate space of the living room, where attention deepens and boundaries between self and screen blur even further.
Everyone is talking about Adolescence, the four-part series released by Netflix on 13 March 2025. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, the series follows the story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who is arrested for the murder of a schoolmate. Each of its four episodes are shot in one-take.
It has been described as,
“flawless,” “unnervingly on the nose,” “the closest thing to TV perfection,” “television in its purest distillation: unflinching, pulse-quickening,” “an all-time technical masterpiece,” “effectively a live performance without retakes,” and “a searing collision of the tragic and the mundane.”
The focus is, quite rightly, on the pressing social issues the series brings into view: toxic masculinity, social media harms, knife crime, violence against women, and the radicalising of young men.
But Adolescence has also lit a cultural fuse.
On the 29th of March, Sir Gareth Southgate, former manager of the Men’s England football team, gave the Richard Dimbleby lecture, describing the “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain.” On 31 March, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer invited Adolescence co-writer, Jack Thorne, and producer, Jo Johnson, along with charities and young people to discuss the issues raised in the series. That same day, Netflix announced that the series would be made available to all secondary schools across the UK and that the charity Tender, “will produce guides and resources for teachers, parents and carers to help navigate conversations around the series”.
Britain remains uniquely skilled at producing television that captures - and concentrates - the national mood. Line of Duty (BBC), Happy Valley (BBC), and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV) all show how screen culture can function as a site of moral and social inquiry, not just entertainment. These are not only watercooler moments; they are cultural inflection points.
Part cinéma vérité, part kitchen sink, these series draw on two traditions that foreground realism, vulnerability, and social critique. Echoing the ethos of cinéma vérité, with its naturalistic techniques and unscripted immediacy, they capture a raw, observational intensity. At the same time, they carry forward the legacy of kitchen sink realism, centring working-class life and domestic struggle with unflinching attention to the textures of the everyday. Both traditions converge in their refusal to look away, and in their shared belief that the ordinary holds the key to understanding the structural.
Similar productions have emerged state side as well, Mare of Easttown (HBO, 2021, USA), Unbelievable (Netflix, 2019, USA), and American Rust (Showtime, 2021, USA), all speak to themes of working-class subjectivity and institutional betrayal, prioritising localism, narrative patience, and realism over spectacle.
These productions are unified by their incisive exploration of institutional failures and their profound impact on individuals, particularly within the framework of the social contract, effectively highlighting the erosion of societal trust and the consequences of systemic dysfunction.
One-take cinematography takes these traditions further.
The one-take technique in filmmaking carries a distinct cinematic power. It is revered both for its technical prowess and its emotional and philosophical implications.
Our inner tempo is recalibrated, not by narrative pace, but to real time. It is immersive, intense, urgent without frenzy, and it demands fidelity to the moment. And in doing so, this fidelity allows for a moral dimension to the experience. We are in reality, in truth, in sincerity. There is no edit to mask failure or revise choice. This is high-stakes cinema.
We are not merely viewers, we are bearing witness.
A single continuous take eliminates the cuts and edits that typically guide the viewer’s attention. It mimics the unbroken flow of human perception, creating an unusually immersive experience. The audience is not passively following a constructed narrative, they are inside the unfolding of time.
Without cuts, both actors and camera operators must remain perfectly present. The shot becomes a meditation on attention, requiring intense discipline and coordination. Mistakes cannot be edited out. This results in a palpable sense of risk and vitality - every movement counts.
Without editing to manipulate, compress, or expand time, the one-take technique respects temporal integrity, emotions unfold without interruption, creating a profound sense of tension.
The aesthetic of craftsmanship in the one-shot technique becomes a meta-commentary on the art of filmmaking itself. The absence of cuts draws attention to the precision of choreography, lighting, sound, and timing. It is raw. It is naked. A technical virtuosity of truth. It is a form of cinematic bravura, but one that can also serve the story.
And there is an epistemological transparency. Cuts in film are a form of montage, an editorial hand that shapes reality. The editor is the story teller. A one-shot film resists that hand. While still choreographed, it presents a visual epistemology of openness, uncertainty, and trust.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the series’s third episode.
[Full disclosure. About 10 minutes into this episode, I had to pause and put the radio on in the other room to keep me grounded in reality and maintain some distance from the characters.]
It is in this episode where Erin Doherty’s character, forensic psychologist Briony Ariston, goes toe to toe with Owen Cooper’s Jamie Miller, the adolescent protagonist. It is unflinching. It is an exposition of someone trying to reach a boy locked in belief systems about who he is.
Each time Jamie emerges from behind the mask, the bravado, the ideology, Briony pins him by keeping her attention on him. She stays in contact. “Does he believe he is ugly? Does he understand that Katie is not coming back?”
This episode, like a box within a box - held first by the series, then by our witnessing - reveals something essential.
Everyone is out of contact.
The teachers don’t really know the students (the tears from Mrs Bailey as Jade storms out are particularly discomforting). Ashley Walters' police officer doesn't really see his son. Jamie’s family live under the same roof but speak across a void.
The series shows what it means to be proximate, but not present. Together, but out of contact.
The one-take binds us to the actors - and the crew. The camera doesn’t blink. And neither do we. The viewer is drawn into contact - intentional, embodied, sincere - sharply contrasting with the lack of contact between the characters on screen.
It is this that makes the series so very poignant and so sharp in its message.
How is it that we see them so clearly yet they cannot see each other?
In addition to the urgent conversations around radicalisation and masculinity, we should also pause to honour the cinematic integrity of the single take and its ability to create a continuous field of contact between subject and viewer. Where editing cannot shield us from discomfort, ambiguity, and stillness. Where we are denied that relief, tethered to the unfolding.
Adolescence holds us in a cinematic realism where attention is not just sustained but demanded. This is the art of unbroken contact. And it matters.
Because what Adolescence ultimately names - beyond the crime, beyond the headlines - is a deeper social fracture. It ostensibly names the failure of the social contract, and implicitly names our fractured attention. It reminds us that the real story is not what we’re watching, it’s what we’ve stopped seeing. Like stepping out into sunlight after the movie ends, only to realise the real story is out here, still unfolding.
Until the next dispatch,
Tina