Review: Want to relive your terrible teen years? Catch ‘The Plague’
2025 / Dir. Charlie Polinger
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Reliving your horrible middle school years, but in the style of Michael Haneke remaking Beau Travail inside a summer camp.
Middle school is the nightmare version of the Hogwarts sorting hat, where one day it’s been decided for you whether you’re cool or a loser for the next decade. In Charlie Polinger’s debut feature, The Plague, Ben (Everett Blunck), finds himself caught between wanting to be a lackey of a 2003 summer water polo camp’s tween bully or living freely as a social pariah—but that also may involve contracting a contagious skin rash that rots your brain.
While The Plague isn’t a straight horror movie, it uses plenty of horror elements to remind you of how awful puberty can be. Their summer camp is often eerie and empty when Ben isn’t trying to fit in with the “alpha pack” of pre-teens run by Jake (Kayo Martin), an aloof bully prone to mind games. Underwater scenes of water polo practice or the girls’ synchronized swim team are disorienting, as if David Lynch had filmed his nephew’s after-school game. Likewise, Johan Lenox’s unique score of distorted a cappella layers and clanging reinforces Ben’s alienation and confusion, having to navigate a situation he’s been forced into after having to move with his mom from Boston and put into the second session of a summer camp where the social hierarchy has already been established.
The counterpoint to the bully Jake is Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), an autism-coded reject from the team who has a skin rash that Jake quickly tells Ben is “the plague” and highly contagious. If anyone comes in contact with Eli, they have to furiously wash themselves immediately or risk coming down with it, which may just be a rash or could make you brain-dead.
Polinger teases whether the Plague is real or not throughout the film, but it doesn’t seem to matter to Eli; he just does his own thing. While Ben seems capable of fitting in with Jake’s crew, he’s drawn to Eli’s penchant for gory pranks and love of Lord of the Rings. Ben’s push-pull between Jake and Eli could be read as a deeper metaphor for autism masking, or, more generally, for the pressures to fit in and how we’re conditioned to give up our humanity at an early age by leaning into group conformity.
Each of the three major young actors delivers a remarkably natural and believable performance, and Polinger’s confident direction takes me back to how terrible those early teen years (really, all the teen years) can be. There’s also some quite funny writing at times—Joel Edgerton isn’t used much as the boys’ coach, but has a hilariously deflating inspirational speech about how being a teenager sucks, and so do your twenties, and maybe your thirties.
There does come a time when it feels like The Plague is treading water, maintaining a rhythm of bullying and questioning whether the plague is real until it gets to its genuinely outstanding ending. At just over 90 minutes, the script doesn’t quite have the juice to sustain itself and could have explored other ideas, like a barely introduced crush Ben has on a girl from the neighboring camp, or by giving Jake more depth beyond basic daddy issues.
When it comes to delivering a deeply uncomfortable and unnervingly accurate portrayal of early teenage male adolescence, though, The Plague is certainly a success and a promising debut for a new director. Whether you want to dive in yourself is another story entirely.