The 2005 film, Michael Haneke’s Caché, opens with a clever trick that demands patience from its viewers. As the opening credits slowly unfurl across the screen, the camera is fixed resolutely on the intersection of two Parisian streets. Not much is happening. The camera’s focal point is a two-storey home with shrubbery creeping up its walls and over the roof. Parked in front are two small cars. The camera stays planted on this unremarkable scene for so long that the chirping of birds starts to stand out as a noticeable feature. A pedestrian passes by, and does nothing. Then a motorist flits past, then an occupant of the home departs through the front gates, and a cyclist pedals towards us—but none of these non-events has happened with any rapidity, and this glacial pace could continue all day. We’re well aware that a camera planted at any random street corner, were it to roll on for hours and hours, would likely capture almost nothing of interest. This is what we’ve been invited to watch.
At a certain point, Caché relies on the fact that the viewer is bored—restless. This is unwatchable! What is going on? Suddenly we hear the voices of a woman and a man. They seem to be passing commentary on the scene. The fourth wall has been broken. The viewer is now aware of watching a scene that is also being watched by other people. The perfectly composed scene is suddenly scrambled. It is being wound backwards, and now it is stopping. It is now apparent that we’re watching footage captured on video cassette. The camera is no longer an impartial witness to a nondescript street corner. We now understand the camera has been intentionally placed as an active participant in recording events that have subsequently become available for viewing by the man and the woman—the central couple of the film: Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche). The couple have received the video cassette for reasons unknown, and, not long afterwards, they start to receive disturbing, hand-drawn pictures too.
Caché would not work without the technology of surveillance. The camera’s unflinching stare at the couple’s urban home is unnerving because we know this is a tool that can be used against anyone. In public spaces—shopping malls, airports, convenience stores—we assume the presence of cameras, and they don’t alter our experience very much, but the silent stare of a camera at a front gate feels personal. A random couple finding themselves surveilled will start to wonder why they have been singled out. They might start to feel like criminals. So it is with Caché, as the couple’s suspicion and unease deepens. One out of the pair must have done something wrong. It turns out to be the husband…. Famously, Caché offers several explanations for the arrival of the video cassettes and the hand-drawn pictures. It starts to feel like an extortion scheme and yet nothing is being extorted. None of the apparent explanations for these events ever quite sticks.
This spring was the third time I’ve watched Caché. It occured to me that all-seeing eye of the video camera might intentionally suggest omniscience. There is a point of view operating here, quite independently of any character in the film, independent of any human character at all. This omniscient presence sees all, judges all. The characters can attempt to wriggle out of their responsibilities all they like. Nothing will save them from the all-seeing eye of the camera, which sits impassively, taking in a wide angle, utterly incurious about people’s facial expressions, about how they feel, about their private justifications for their actions. In Caché, a crime is a crime, no matter the context. As the plot offers layer after layer of depth to the mystery, the feeling of criminality broadens beyond the individual and indicts an entire society. Caché comes down harshly on post-colonial France. The clue is right there in the title: Caché (hidden). There are crimes from France’s colonial past that have been deliberately hidden from view. The film invites us to imagine an alternate reality in which hidden cameras had been filming and broadcasting the truths of history all along.
Caché depends upon the audience’s prior knowledge and experience of technology. Even today, when video cassettes have mostly fallen out of use, we all know what it means to rewind a scene. You drag your finger along the bottom of the Netflix screen to replay a crucial clip of dialogue that you might have missed the first time. In the world of Caché, technology is a truth-teller. It doesn’t solve problems. It exposes them. In hindsight, this seems a pretty good deal. In Caché, humans are deeply flawed, but technology can seem like a partial corrective.
Fast forward to the brand-new Netflix drama, Adolescence, (filmed entirely in northern England) and the relationship to technology has profoundly shifted. Here, too, the camera is a decisive actor in its own right. Adolescence deploys just one take for each of its four episodes. This is an impressive feat. The effect is instantaneous, and almost the reverse of the impassive, all-seeing eye of Caché. While the latter film allows for context to slowly unfold and for details to be discovered, the roving camera of Adolescence throws the viewer into uncomfortable proximity to every single character and there is no letting up. While the camera of Caché suggests an outside moral compass, in Adolescence, morality appears to be exclusively personal.
Adolescence has a plot that is just as much driven by technology as Caché. It is the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who is lured into white-hot rage by the internet and murders a female classmate. In 2005, technology was given centre stage, but by 2025, the show’s creators are well aware that their audience has become exhausted by technology. We never “see” the internet and the prurient details that might have radicalized our terrifyingly young anti-hero. Instagram posts are printed out and thrown onto the interrogation table as evidence. The camera rarely pays attention to the evidence. Rather, the camera is forever fixated on people—their movements, their facial expressions, their trembling hands. Characters spend a lot of time navigating space: opening and closing doors, marching up and down stairs, getting in and out of cars. The effect is dismaying, almost suffocating.
There were moments during Adolescence when I was desperate for the camera to zoom out, to pan, to tilt away—but it almost never did so. There was one moment when it seemed that the camera might pull back enough to provide a view of the surrounding Yorkshire countryside, but I saw no more than the edges of a field or two before the camera descended again—into a parking lot, the crime scene, and the feeling of dread returned. Adolescence provides almost no respite from the miserable, contorted faces of its deeply suffering cast of characters. Technology might have contributed to the awful tragedy at the centre of this story, but technology is almost never the focus and never the answer to a question. Even when the blundering lead police investigator is taken aside by his own son to be lectured about clues he is missing, the correction relates to matters of interpretation. The hapless cop can’t read emojis properly. He has not yet been initiated into the language of adolescents. The camera captures his bewildered response perfectly.
While in Caché, the characters are given time and space to reflect on their plight, in Adolescence, every character seems to be in the grip of their emotions with scarcely a moment to breathe. We bear witness to so much crying and shouting and bewilderment, as well as enduring middle-age love and shattered dreams. The greater message of Adolescence seems to be that technology has not so much dehumanized us as it has deformed us. In our hyper-technological society, base impulses and emotions are all still there—more malignant than ever.
While in Caché it’s just about possible to glimpse a redemptive power in the all-seeing eye of the camera, in Adolescence, technology offers no redemption whatsoever. In the high-tech police station, where the alleged murderer, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is “processed”—finger-printed and strip searched and interrogated—technology is simply a cold, impartial collector of biometric data, nothing more, nothing less. As for the greater technological force that set the plot into motion—the computer—frankly, it’s a monster. The parents speak of the computer that they purchased for their adolescent son as if it were a kidnapper they unwittingly invited into their home. After the arrival of the computer, their son “disappeared” into a private world of his own.
In less adept hands, this story would have quickly disintegrated into melodrama. Like I said, so much crying! So much rage! But Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne have avoided all the predictable pitfalls. For one thing, Jamie Miller’s parents are decent, good people. Flawed, and largely oblivious to their son’s online life, their fate is nevertheless terrifying—and plausible. Here’s a salt-of-the-earth family, a straight-A son with a hard-working and principled father—a father who, it should be noted, has maintained a devout commitment to never hitting his son because he suffered such a brutal upbringing of his own—and what’s the reward? A child stolen from him while sitting in the room next door, quiet and “safe” at his desk. It’s profoundly unsettling. Twenty years ago, in the age of Caché, many of us were optimistic about technology, or, at worst, ambivalent. In 2025, there’s not much to redeem the dystopian technological society we have created.
As the camera moves up and down the staircase of Jamie Miller’s school, following kids and adults alike into the classrooms and outdoors into the tennis courts, a feeling of despair crept over me. Even the TV cops are dismayed. There’s not much learning happening here, they observe, shuddering. The school is little more than a “holding pen.” The horror of it all is that this is arguably true of the wider society that we’re all living in. We’re being held here for an uncertain duration of time. There is no “outside.” In our society, there is no external point of view offering the promise of revelatory moral truths. Technology is now the barbed wire of our giant prison. To escape, you have to will yourself to be somewhere totally different—somewhere, perhaps, not of this world at all. To accept this society as is would be to surrender to a perpetual adolescence: a constant striving for acceptance, social ranking, popularity—to be “liked.” This is a tendency we’re supposed to one day grow out of and yet I suspect that more people than ever are dangerously stalled in a state of arrested development, every day surrendering a little more of their agency to technological forces they cannot resist, let alone control.
NOTES
I shouldn’t have opened this post with a picture of Nirvana when I had no intention of writing about the early 90’s “slackers,” but to try and retroactively justify my action, here’s the article from which I swiped the image. The author writes, “we’ve never been more skeptical of the very social media platforms that have quietly and powerfully shaped influencer culture. (Nor, it seems, have governments around the world.) We once saw these platforms as a frivolous, even fun place to post our memories and talk to our friends and family. Now, we understand them to be an often pernicious driving force behind societal, economic, and political shifts—supranational actors that, far from being the neutral platforms they frame themselves as, feed upon our striving as their sustenance.” The article does a good job of contrasting the constant striving that takes place on social media with the slacker culture of Nirvana and Reality Bites, daring to suggest that youth culture might pivot away from striving and return to something more relaxed. The article was published in 2019 and, well, I think we’re all waiting for the anticipated relaxation of social pressures! The huge audience for Adolescence and the conversation the program has ignited suggests we’re more concerned than ever about our technology addiction.