In his electrifying recap of Adolescence Episode 3, DECIDER’s own Sean T. Collins sagely notes that the Netflix show defies comps to similar standout TV. “It’s not like that episode of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. It’s really not,” he writes, before laying out all the ways in which writers Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, director Philip Barantini, cinematographer Matthew Lewis, and actors Erin Doherty and Owen Cooper elevate this hour of TV into transcendent art.
Adolescence Episode 3 really is a one-of-a-kind viewing experience, and yet, I have to admit I love it because it’s also the latest and greatest installment in what I affectionately call the “Mindhunter” genre. You know, shows literally like Netflix’s Mindhunter or NBC’s Hannibal. Heck, it’s a sub-genre that covers any and all adaptations of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and much of director David Fincher’s oeuvre. Psychological thrillers that pit an intelligent and compassionate professional against a killer. The deadly duel between these two opposing forces is usually nothing more than a conversation. The horror winds up being less about gore and more about how evil can manifest itself in human form.
Adolescence harnesses the precise horror of this “Mindhunter” genre with a chilling new twist: the killer is a child.
Adolescence is a four-part British series that follows the fallout of a 13-year-old boy’s arrest for the murder of a classmate. Each episode is shot in one single long take, forcing the audience to take in the mundane as much as the lurid facts of the murder. At first, it seems incomprehensible that cherub-faced Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) could have committed any crime. The end of Adolescence Episode 1 leaves no doubt, though, that the kid did really stab Katie to death.
Adolescence doesn’t indulge the armchair sleuths looking for an Agatha Christie-like twist. (Jamie killed Katie. End of story.) Rather, it probes a deeper, more disturbing mystery: how could a child become a killer?
Adolescence Episode 3 is all about psychologist Briony Ariston’s (Erin Doherty) fifth and final assessment of young Jamie. She’s brought marshmallows for the boy’s hot chocolate and a cheese and pickle sandwich if he wants it. At first, their banter is polite, friendly even. However, as Briony strategically hits various trigger points — Jamie’s idea of masculinity, his relationship with his father figures, his feelings about women — the boy shifts into something monstrous.
It’s not just that Jamie begins to lose his temper, snarls back at Briony, or even starts to physically threaten her; what’s terrifying is this young man’s precision when it comes to manipulation. He negs Briony as quickly as he cajoles her. He justifies his actions with buzz words or plays the desperate child. His ability to shift strategies in hopes of getting the emotional response he wants is honestly as brutal a weapon as the kitchen knife he used to slay Katie.
What’s all the more disturbing is that the show never lets you forget that Jamie is just a boy. He might have burgeoning sexual desires and a rap sheet, but he’s still an adolescent. Jamie yearns for Briony’s approval, literally begging her at the end to tell him that she likes him. He’s fallen so hard for the incel messaging of online scumbags like Andrew Tate because he’s thirsting for guidance. He wants marshmallows with his cocoa, for Christ’s sake!
Still, Jamie is a cold blooded killer. His pride and charisma even remind one a bit of Mindhunter‘s Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton). Kemper could have been a really nice guy to hang out with, you know, if not for all the serial killing and decapitations and grotesque sexual assaults on the corpses of his victims. The Kemper we meet in Mindhunter is a fully-formed adult monster. There’s no saving him. Jamie is still so young there’s a glimmer of hope that if someone had stepped in, cut off his screen time, and just validated him, Katie could still be alive. (Right? Right?)
One of the most magnificent aspect of Adolescence star Erin Doherty’s performance is she leaves that ambiguity there. When Briony refuses to tell Jamie if she likes him or not, it’s impossible to tell if it’s because she’s sticking to her professional mandate or because she’s absolutely repulsed by him. (I read as mix of both, and yet, the human being in her still had the urge to sooth the upset child.) When she takes a moment to collect herself, she uses the opportunity to study Jamie’s unguarded behavior like a mastermind. Whenever Briony is onscreen, she is, indeed, a stand in for the audience trying like hell to make sense of this monstrous little murderer.
But none of this works without Owen Cooper’s masterful turn as Jamie. The young actor flits through Jamie’s shifting moods with the kind of effortless ease you associate with Branagh or Day Lewis. Like Doherty, he leaves the door open for the audience to make their own inferences about Jamie’s capacity for evil. Sure, the ultimate message of Adolescence is that adults are failing kids, leaving them easy prey for the alt-right anti-woman rage machine, but not every kid we meet in the show has become a killer. I mean, there’s something about Jamie in this episode that reminded me of Ed Kemper!
That’s ultimately what I found so chilling and so impressive about Adolescence Episode 3. It’s a sensational two-hander where a child takes the seat usually reserved for a serial killer. Where does that kind of evil incubate? Is it the product of poor parenting and subreddits? Or is that kind of malevolence always there, lurking under a baby face, from the very start?
The post ‘Adolescence’ Episode 3 Harnesses the Horror of the “Mindhunter” Genre With A Chilling New Twist: The Killer is a Child appeared first on Decider.
