Spoilers follow for all four episodes of Adolescence, now streaming on Netflix.

Adolescence isn’t exactly a mystery, since the identity of the killer is never in question. The Netflix limited series, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, opens on a raid of a North England home where the police arrest a 13-year-old boy for the murder of a classmate. Each of Adolescence’s four episodes, all directed by Phillip Barantini, are structured as one-shot takes, and so the first chapter unfolds as a meticulous accounting of what happens as the boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is processed at the police station: fingerprinted, medically evaluated, and assigned a lawyer. As the camera coolly observes the system at work, it lingers on Jamie’s vulnerability and terror; we’re reminded that this is still a boy who wet himself when the police broke down his door, who’s still young enough to be instructed by his father, Eddie (Graham), to eat his police-supplied cornflakes. Genre expectations are such that you might expect the series to linger within the question of whether Jamie did it, but by the end of the first episode, Adolescence removes any ambiguity. His interrogation by officers Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) culminates in the revelation of security footage that captures him stabbing his classmate, a girl named Katie Leonard, multiple times with a kitchen knife. So, Jamie is undoubtedly the killer, and to the extent there’s a mystery, it’s the slippery question of why.

With this early reveal, Adolescence makes its intent clear. The series is less a procedural crime drama than a social portrait diving headfirst into the simmering cultural anxiety around boys and young men in the age of incels, male dislocation, and toxic podcasts. Thorne and Graham’s script unfolds as a progression of set pieces that dip into specific windows in the long aftermath of Jamie’s arrest: The second episode follows Bascombe and Frank as they interview his classmates a few days after the police raid; the third drops in on an incarcerated Jamie a few months later; and the final episode takes place about a year after the arrest, focusing on the Miller family as they struggle to move on with their lives. But within that chronological structure, Adolescence abstains from any strict sociological linearity: Though we’re given some broader context for Jamie’s actions — a mixture of cyberbullying, hormonal distress, and online influence — Thorne and Graham avoid sketching out too specific of a model for why something like this happens and what, if anything, we can do about it. This is reasonable, given the sheer amorphousness of the problem. To what extent can we attribute this to the so-called “manosphere”? To social media and the internet more generally? To a broader misogynistic culture? To the natural cruelty of people, young and old, which exists with and without digital acceleration? The possible explanatory layers overwhelm, and so there’s an honesty to how the series opts to focus on the devastation instead, fading out on the image of the Miller family torn apart and Eddie breaking down on Jamie’s bed.

Adolescence’s explicit interest in incel culture gives it a timely distinction. Fear and anxiety around the subject isn’t particularly new onscreen, but works that seriously grapple with the subject are relatively uncommon. Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling builds up to laughably wacky reveal that Harry Styles was an incel all along, and Todd Phillips’s Joker is often derided as a shallow incel-flavored Taxi Driver knockoff that transposes its anti-hero onto the superhero industrial complex. Adolescence, which voyages well beyond the superficiality of those two films, marks an interesting moment when pop culture appears more willing to directly grapple with the violent specter of red-pilled young men. Last year saw the release of Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte’s short-story collection that builds and expands upon his viral 2019 short story, “The Feminist,” which plays out as a (Vantablack funny) psychological depiction of a try-hard male feminist who drifts deep into incel radicalization. At this very moment, The Pitt is in the middle of paying off its own Chekhov’s Young Adult Male, as emergency-room doctors grapple with the choice of preemptively reporting a young man who made disturbing social-media posts and a list of women he wants to hurt, which runs the risk of ruining his life, or finding some other way to help — an ethical dilemma that comes to a head when a mass shooting is called in.

But Adolescence isn’t really an exploration of incel culture in and of itself, in large part because it never properly plumbs the perspective of Jamie or anybody his age. Rather, the series mirrors the position of its adults, universally stuck on the outside looking in as they try to wrap their heads around Jamie’s interiority. We viewers are primarily situated within the point of view of the officers, the schoolteachers, the therapist, the father. You can sense this roughly in the first episode, where the roving camera trades off between focusing on Eddie and different facets of the police station, and detect it concretely in the second, which follows Bascombe and Frank as they search Jamie’s school for clues that may lead to the murder weapon and a motive. The officers bumble around for answers, clueless and repeatedly dunked on by students until Bascombe’s son, Adam (Amari Bacchus), finally pulls him aside. “You’re not reading what they’re doing,” he says, before explaining his cohorts’ social-media symbology to his impatient father.

The distance between generations is emphasized in this episode, with the school depicted as an unruly wilderness that Bascombe and Frank move through as if it’s a war zone. (This is where Adolescence’s use of the oner briefly evokes Children of Men.) “These kids are impossible,” says one teacher. “What am I supposed to do?” Between the haplessness of the adults and the chaos barely contained by the institution, Thorne and Graham seem to lay down another thread of possible explanation: School conditions are so crowded and chaotic, to a point where Bascombe compares it to a “holding pen,” that you can’t help but see why a boy on the edge of actual violence might be overlooked. Again, Adolescence makes this observation and lets it hang there, much as it does with every other explanatory thread. Bascombe’s arc ends with him making an effort to reconnect with his son, a suggestion that more engaged parenting may well be the solution we need. But in keeping with Adolescence’s intent to distantly observe, it’s barely ever more than a suggestion.

While Adolescence doesn’t break much ground with incel interiority, it does feel genuinely novel in its commitment to steering into adolescent male sexuality. One of the more striking beats in the first episode is a moment where Bascombe and Frank show Jamie printouts of his own Instagram posts featuring female models with innuendo-laced comments. “How do you feel about women, Jamie?” Bascombe asks. “Do you have a girlfriend? If you did, would you want her to look like these women?” The line of questioning is uneasy, not just because we’re watching a 13-year-old boy being confronted with expressions of his own underdeveloped and unfocused sexuality, but because those expressions are contextualized as evidence pointing toward his potential for violence against women. The framing is literally correct but nevertheless tenuous: For better or worse, you can imagine countless other boys his age doing similar things, and it’s hard not to wonder whether 13 is old enough to begin attributing misogyny as a trait.

This thrum of uneasiness further escalates in the third episode, where Jamie is visited by Briony (Erin Doherty), a therapist assigned to evaluate his mental health prior to trial. This is Adolescence’s most interesting set piece, as it labors to show a Jamie deepened in his anger by his time in the detention system. The young Owen Cooper oscillates between projecting emotions we fear from men (rage, entitlement, aggression) and reminders that Jamie is still a 13-year-old who’s now stuck ever deeper in developmental confusion, all bundled up in an interaction where he displays some adolescent sexual desire for his adult interlocutor. It’s an utterly fascinating episode that’s make-or-break for the series as a whole, and though it doesn’t entirely stick the landing, it is gutsy enough to underscore Adolescence’s ambitions to gaze into dicey, sensitive territory.

The true mystery of Adolescence is a genuinely difficult one: What do we do about boys and young men? That a productive answer continues to be elusive underscores the series’ defining feeling, which is a mixture of the eternal parental fear over whether you’ll ever be able to do enough, and the generational fear over how modernity has unknowably but fundamentally altered the natural dangers of boyhood. Adolescence is a work of social realism, but it also captures the cosmic horror lingering in the background within the experience of raising a boy. The series’ final episode, its most overtly emotional, sticks with the Miller parents as they’re tortured with questions of what went wrong — and how they failed as parents. “He never left his room,” says his mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco). “He’d come home, slam the door, straight up the stairs on the computer.” Eddie replies, by saying that you can’t keep an eye on your kids all the time, but he, too, is ravaged by doubt. He wonders if he could have done better setting Jamie up with sports. Did his abuse by his own father pass down some anger to Jamie? The fear you’re left with is the gnawing sense that there are, ultimately, no answers, and that the fate of the children you love is never fully in your hands.