As a festival curator, I’ve seen them all: the weird, the wonderful, and the just plain crazy. But one thing I’ve learned is how to interpret and I’d like to pass an unpopular opinion onto you, for your benefit. If we don’t walk the hill that is hard now, it will become a mountain tomorrow.
Another new series, another knee-jerk reaction. Incels have been around for a long time. We just ignored them and it won’t be solved now by making kids watch a TV series; they already know this stuff. I’d even go as far as to call them experts. But did you know: if you found yourself an unknowing parent, the series was aimed at you. That’s right, I sat next to another boy in my school at 13 years old, quiet, often isolating himself, spending hours on web forums, characteristics that people called “introverted.” He donned black gloves and went on a killing spree. Mass shootings and incel-related sexual violence are still on the rise today. But why is it only the violence that draws a reaction?
After watching Adolescence fire a silenced pistol, my thoughts went back to older depictions of such character arcs: Fight Club (1999), Taxi Driver (1976), even the shooter in Slacker (1992). These are depictions of people who felt they had been used, overworked, or had done something for society but were then left to realise they were of little importance. No reward, no profound love, just midlife-crisis adult men entering a dark and lonely place filled with negative thoughts and rage, feeling that only violent action can prove their worth. I don’t doubt that violence can provide someone with a feeling of value if executed properly, but at what cost does this action come? Adolescence (2025) successfully stopped idealising it. It refused to make a redeemable protagonist and instead showed us how innocence can be spoiled by this dark pill that, once swallowed, infects the psyche. Thanks to social media, once a child is old enough to grasp a mobile device in their small hands, they are in immediate communication with the world. Every anxiety and insecurity is preyed upon by marketing and careless algorithms that seek out youth and smell the hormonal frustrations of our tweens and teens. “Automatic” parenting and ill-informed adults place their hopes in “parental controls” and GPS trackers, easily lured into a false sense of security for their children. But what are we protecting our children from? Do we even know? I can tell you: the nice quiet boy who sat next to me in secondary school, his parents probably hadn’t thought of it. Did you?
I am not trying to unnecessarily scaremonger. Many men who suffer from this form of middle-aged depression are non-violent, lethargic, and unmotivated, often identifying as victims of society. They blame others, they isolate and just as I write this alone in my flat tonight, I suddenly feel quite the hypocrite. But I can tell you with honesty that it is not your fault that you didn’t know what your child was looking at. You didn’t want this. You didn’t want your child on social media. Middle-aged men’s gripes with society aren’t something children should be exposed to. But it is here, it’s happening, and we must open our collective eyes.
I did find it strange that the police officer in Adolescence didn’t know what an incel was, even though they are labelled as domestic terrorists and one self-proclaimed “incel-terminator” carried out the first mass shooting during the 2020 lockdowns in this country since the 1970s. That was the genius of this mini-series: we all ignore it. We are all somehow oblivious. Because how do you fight an “identity”? A self-proclaimed and self-victimising identity that is ominously pushed towards younger and younger people through an army of bots and social media pages? How do you outpace a storm? We have to do it together. I call today for all parents to give their children what we call “brick-phones.” They can still call and text you, so why would you need parental controls on that? Why would you need a GPS tracker on a child who shouldn’t be without adult supervision anyway? Don’t be lulled into an illusion that can hurt your children. I was so happy with my Sony Ericsson K800i as a child, because it was all I had and thus I didn’t expect anything more. I didn’t need a smartphone supercomputer until I was 17 and all my peers were on internet-based texting apps. It wasn’t immediate for all of us. The idea of your child walking around with a laptop was funny and weird, so why does a smartphone have to be any different? All parents at a school should do this mutually, so no one feels left out, at least until we gain control of the animal that is social media.
This piece reflects the views of its author and not an official position of Screen Culture International Film Festival.