Adolescence, and the words left unsaid.

Earlier I went to visit my folks and we got to chatting about Adolescence (2025). It’s currently seized the zeitgeist, and for very good reason: it feels incredibly real and raw, quintessentially Brechtian, and ultimately poignant.

The characters are multi-faceted and complex. There’s no simplistic moralising or demonising, no straight-forward conclusions to draw, or simplistic overt message neatly tied up at the end.

There’s a great novelty to the single camera shot style, which compounds the immediacy of the fly-on-the-wall experience we have as a spectator. There’s no real respite throughout and no distancing due to the lack of traditional editing techniques; no cuts or scene changes that give a natural moment to pause and take a break (or get distracted).

It’s infused with a sort of indie, risk-taking mentality. Trusting the audience to be paying enough attention, and receptive enough, to pick up on the cues and clues; a welcome break from the more commonplace Netflix bland designed-by-committee, “Are you still watching?”, overdone and stale stereotypes, paint-by-number sludge that we’ve collectively expressed frustration with.

So much of what happens occurs in the silence between the characters. Words left unsaid, left hanging for the audience to grapple with and ultimately make their own minds up about who’s culpable.

If Virginia Woolf was alive today, it’s likely the sort of work she’d produce.
All of the unwavering and unflinching social realism of Ken Loach.

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Bit by bit this led me to thinking about telling complicated, incomplete stories with stylistically imposed restrictions.

I think most people are at least familiar with the most famous six-word story, often attributed to Hemingway:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Either way this led me down a bit of a wiki-hole this evening, looking into Flash Fiction as an entry point (a term I don’t think I’d heard of before).

While stood, doing dishes, before going down the wiki-hole, I’d been thinking of experimenting with this format as a form of micro poem, so here’s what came to me:

With babe in arms, she braved the storm.

Hermitically, he retreated to the woods, determined to learn about our tribe.

The poet beltched in naïvety.

Fleeting moments, fractionally glimpsed, little understood.