Adolescence

Directed by Philip Barantini and starring Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, Adolescence is a British four-part miniseries about a young teenage boy accused of murder.

The first fifteen seconds or so of the trailer features a cold open, with a police raid on a home—underscoring the drama of the situation. Voices are amplified and tensions are high—the room tone is almost deafening.

After the studio logo at 0:15 and a single, ominous tone in the strings, we’re back at the police station, with the visual cut in with a violent clapping motif that we’ll hear throughout the trailer (it’s a bit nondescript, sounding like a clap mixed with a door slamming, perhaps).

At 0:22 we get a blaring sound from a synth with the boy in a police car; at 0:29, we hear an eerie, breathy sound in the soundtrack, as if in commentary to the questions in interrogation about Katie Leonard. At 0:38 we get a distinct high timbre similar to a heartbeat flatlining, partly in response to the kid answering, “is she dead, then?”, and partly a general play for an anxiety-ridden atmosphere.

Finally, at 0:48 these musical elements begin to converge, with a steady, pulsing beat, regular claps, and cascading, rustic violin motifs alongside some other sound elements like a ticking clock. Notice the return of the high-pitched, tinnitus-like sound at 0:58 just as the lad touches presumably his dad’s shoulder, and the way he winces—it’s cognitive and emotional dissonance created from such a high-stress scenario, rendered even more stark by the audio.

At 0:35 and 0:36, a couple of minor jump scares bring us back in, with title cards for the actors and the addition of epic percussion to the arrangement. We’re treated to some memorable audiovisual interplay at 1:48, when the tinnitus sound returns again—and this time, we can’t hear the boy’s violent, emotional outburst, despite clearly seeing loud behaviour on screen as he swipes a cup of water off the table and yells. We begin to hear his muffled yelling just as we see his father in deep distress—again, the sound emulating a deep sense of discomfort in face of his son’s increasingly clear guilt.

Overall, it’s this tinnitus-like motif that proves to be the aural thread that ties this trailer together. Though occasional flourishes in the arrangement and the inclusion of distinct rhythmic motifs and sounds undergird the arrangement, the high-pitched whines get at the psychological drama at play here—at first foreboding and ominous, and by the end becoming undeniable, even affecting our ability to hear the lad’s mental breakdown in front of the interrogator.

It’s this progression and emphasis on what the suspect and his family are thinking and feeling through sound design that makes this such a successful trailer.

Adolescence arrives on Netflix March 13th.

— Curtis Perry