‘adolescence,’ ‘eric Larue,’ And The Burden Of Parental Guilt

Two new narratives give painful expression to every parent’s nightmare. What if your child murdered a classmate?

It’s a harrowing dilemma explored before in movies like Mass (2021) or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). And in Netflix’s Adolescence and the just-released film Eric LaRue, the sobering questions are revisited. What would you do as a parent in this situation? How would you deal with the many layers of grief and guilt?

Adolescence has been this year’s buzziest limited series, setting viewership records on Netflix and earning rave reviews for powerhouse acting and each episode’s one-long-shot, real-time filmmaking technique. Praised by British prime minister Keir Starmer, the series will apparently be shown across schools in Britain. The four-part series follows a middle-class British family, the Millers, whose lives change forever when their 13-year-old son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), is arrested for the murder of a female classmate. Each episode explores the scenario’s horror—both on a personal and societal level—from different angles. It’s difficult to watch. Adolescence wrestles not only with age-old questions of nature and nurture but also timely issues related to technology, gender politics, the “manosphere,” and how young people are being shaped in a scrolling world.

Eric LaRue is an adaptation of an acclaimed 2002 stage play about the mother of a school shooter. Though the film (Michael Shannon’s directorial debut) is tonally uneven and generally less compelling than Adolescence, Judy Greer delivers a powerful performance as Janice, the mother of the titular character. Much of the film’s drama arises from her decision to meet with the mothers of her son’s victims.

Theological questions about sin and guilt abound in both Adolescence and Eric LaRue, implicitly in the former and explicitly in the latter. Adolescence never mentions God and faith, while Eric LaRue foregrounds Christianity and church life in surprising (often frustrating) ways. Both contain insights into human suffering, but both highlight the hopelessness of grief and guilt without the true gospel.

Perils of Parenting

Adolescence begins its first episode and ends the final episode in Jamie’s childhood bedroom. The scenes are very different, but the space—a classic boyish room, astronomy wallpaper and all—is the same. In the first episode, police raid Jamie’s home in the morning, pulling him out of bed and taking him to jail. He’ll never return to that bed.

The final episode finds Jamie’s dad, Eddie (played with visceral force by Stephen Graham), weeping in Jamie’s bedroom, crying on his boy’s now-empty bed, holding a childhood teddy bear as a proxy for his lost son. The song “Through the Eyes of a Child” by Norwegian artist AURORA plays. It’s a devastating scene that captures the ache of innocence gone, loss that can’t be undone, and childhood abruptly ended.

Eric LaRue has similar scenes where Janice enters her son’s empty bedroom or sees flashes of memories of his boyhood: playing with toys, drawing pictures, having fun outdoors on a summer vacation. These are devastating juxtapositions, capturing the pain of a parent reconciling memories of the wide-eyed boy who was and her grief over the murderous criminal who now is.

Every parent has to deal with the “coming of age” transition of childhood to adulthood: the gradual loss of innocence as your child develops agency, a fledgling and fragile sense of identity, and moral accountability. Even when children don’t grow up to murder, their moral autonomy sometimes results in choices that grieve us. Parents wonder, What in our parenting could have led our child to this decision?

Parents wonder, What in our parenting could have led our child to this decision?

These questions are ratcheted up to the extreme in Adolescence and Eric LaRue. Jamie’s parents second-guess how they responded to his struggles in athletics and his interest in art. They (rightly) regret thinking Jamie was “safe” when he was in his room on his computer, door closed, late into the night. Eric’s parents regret not having certain key conversations with their son. They regret not probing more when he was being bullied at school. In both cases, the sons end up owning their guilt and not blaming their parents for their evil choices. But that doesn’t mean the parents can absolve themselves.

Burden of Guilt

What do you do with guilt you can’t release? That’s the central theological dilemma for the parents in these stories. A dark red stain seeps over their lives, and they can’t clean it off themselves (a scene of Eddie trying to wash graffiti off his work van—to no avail—carries deep layers of theological meaning). These families are looking for grace and freedom amid the heaviest of circumstances. They’re not finding it.

The parents in Eric LaRue, Janice and Ron, are churchgoing Christians. But they look to different churches—with different theological approaches—for healing. Ron (Alexander Skarsgård) finds false comfort in a Pentecostal church that preaches a prosperity gospel where God doesn’t want you to suffer and provides instant healing. Janice prefers the local Presbyterian church, which errs in the other direction, overemphasizing the penance of pain without providing a path out of it. At one point, Ron tells Janice he thinks she should “hand over her burdens” to Jesus. Janice replies, “But what if I still need them?” Ron says, “You will have immediate peace.” But Janice retorts, “I don’t want immediate peace.”

Ron thinks God wants him to move on from pain in triumphant hope. Janice is too comfortable with her suffering and has so internalized the tragedy that it’s now intertwined with her identity. As she tells Eric when they have a prison visitation, his school shooting murders “are a part of [her] now.”

What do you do with guilt you can’t release? That’s the central theological dilemma for the parents in these stories.

The diverging approaches of Ron and Janice, and their preferred flavors of Christianity, reminded me of the two churches in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2018). That movie similarly juxtaposed a dour mainline church (First Reformed) with a prosperity-oriented megachurch (Abundant Life), pondering how each approached questions of grace and redemption. Sadly, even though faith shows up often in Eric LaRue, it feels more counterproductive than helpful. As the film ends, Janice especially seems as lost as she did at the start.

In Adolescence, church and faith play no role in the family’s coping with trauma. It’s agonizing in the final episode to watch the Miller family grasp for answers and relief from their deep pain. Should they move to a new city? They intuitively know this won’t help. Can they try to “forget” Jamie? No, he’ll always be part of their family. Will they find solace in each other? This seems their only viable source of hope: clinging to one another whatever comes.

‘I’m Sorry’ and Hints of Hope

The final words of Adolescence are telling. As he weeps on his son’s empty bed, Eddie says, “I’m sorry, son. I should have done better.”

Even as Eddie’s words reflect the painful regret he’ll live with forever, they also feel like a step in the direction of freedom—just as confession of sin is a precursor to growth in the Christian life. Saying the words out loud is both agonizing and cathartic.

I’m sorry. I should have done better.

No doubt he could have done better. All of us could. And yet owning the mistakes, and grieving his (and his son’s) sin, is part of how Eddie will heal.

Eric LaRue ends with Janice still trying to rationalize her bullied son’s actions as they share a conversation in prison. Eric is frustrated that his mom feels more concerned for him than for his victims’ families. His last words to her—and the final words of the film—are a message he wants her to relay to the mothers of the dead boys: “Please, tell them I feel remorse.”

Both films, then, end with remorse and confession—the slightest hints of hope. But the gospel offers so much more. As I watched the credits roll on these bleak dramas, I envisioned a future for Jamie’s family and Eric’s family in which their desperate need and insufficiency led them into the arms of the only sufficient Savior, a future where their pain propelled them into the fullness of God’s grace.