THE PLAGUE ***1/2
Charlie Polinger2025
IDEA: At a water polo summer camp in 2003, a diffident boy becomes both victim and collaborator of his predatory peers.
BLURB: A dread-inducing coming-of-age thriller, The Plague makes the case that there’s perhaps no worse period in life than a boy’s early adolescence. It’s not exactly a novel perspective, but it’s one that first-time feature filmmaker Charlie Polinger vividly demonstrates in 90 supremely stressful minutes that should conjure a chilling wave of memories for males in the audience who survived middle school. Although the premise suggests body horror — and there is a fair amount of acned and scabbed skin — the film deemphasizes obvious puberty metaphors to instead locate its terror in the realm of the social. For Polinger, the physical awkwardness of pubescence is nothing compared to the toxic group behavior of a gaggle of preteen boys in a confined space. His superb cast of young actors, tasked with carrying the weight of a film almost entirely absent of adults, creates a pungently realistic homosocial atmosphere of taunting, posturing, and libidinal excess in which a timid boy like Everett Blunck’s Ben can never feel totally safe. Polinger compounds the sense of menace in Kubrickian tracking shots down the empty hallways of the community center and in reverberating sound design that combines underwater ambience with eerie non-diegetic vocalizations. Is The Plague perhaps overdetermined in its frequently logic-defying deluge of kid horrors? Probably, because seriously, where are the adults?? On the other hand, I think back to my own preteen years in school and remember a galling lack of checks on the most vicious of bullies. Polinger’s film doesn’t seek symbolic revenge on them, Carrie-style, but does something more uneasy by figuring adolescence as a sticky morass we just learn to muddle through, with the knowledge — or blind faith — we’ll emerge better on the other side.
