Joel Edgerton in Tense Drama of Adolescent Angst

Charlie Polinger opens his thrilling and uneasy directorial debut feature The Plague with an arresting sequence that quickly establishes the haunting undertones of this adolescent psychological thriller. The ambient, muffled sound of sloshing water is set against a shot of the bottom of a pool. One by one, swimmers drop into the massive indoor basin. Their spindly legs move awkwardly as they try to get in sync. It’s 2003, and these are the middle-school-aged attendees of the Tom Lerner Water Polo camp. From this angle, Polinger and his cinematographer Steven Breckon make these kids look like phantasmic figures. 

An eerie sense of unreality runs through The Plague, which premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Working from a screenplay he also wrote, Polinger uses horror conventions to tease out the psychic terror and intimidation of pre-teen social codes. In the age of renewed questions about and considerations of the manosphere, The Plague is a prescient title. Polinger’s film is not as dark as Netflix’s popular miniseries Adolescence, but it does circle similarly unsettling themes — like the way the terms and tenets of masculinity are dictated by arbitrary rules, or the cost of nonconformity among young men.

Key performances carry The Plague and alleviate the occasional strain of overwrought direction. Relative newcomers Everett Blunck (stellar in Griffin in the Summer) and Kayo Martin portray opposite ends of youthful angst with an engaging sincerity and terrifying accuracy. Martin, with the subtlety of his judging expressions, seems especially made for his role as Jake, the resident cool kid who weaponizes his sharp attention to detail. The actor plays well against Blunck, who portrays Ben, a new camper trying to figure out where he fits among the various cliques. An anxiety-inducing sound design (by Damian Volpe) and score (by Johan Lenox), coupled with an appropriately icy visual palette built on grays and blue, help tell Polinger’s nail-biting story. 

When Ben (Blunck) arrives at the water polo camp, he quickly notices the hold that Jake (Martin) has on the other boys. The teen with the mess of blonde hair functions as a ring leader and, with his approval, Ben becomes part of the crew. The other boys call Ben, who just moved from Boston, “Soppy” on account of the fact that he garbles the “t” in the word “stop.” One thing Polinger makes clear early on is how closely Jake scrutinizes the other boys — noticing minor characteristics that differentiate them from one another — and uses those observations to mock them. This skill keeps Jake in power, making him an intimidating person to everyone, including the boys’ coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton, in a brief but effective turn).

Ben watches the others too, and he quickly picks up that no one hangs out with Eli (Kenny Rasmussen, also excellent). The quiet child keeps mostly to himself, eating lunch in the locker room and occasionally sleeping there too. According to the other kids, Eli has the plague, a vague disease that allegedly begins with a rash and renders the infected unable to socially function. Jake warns Ben to stay away from Eli and to wash his body should he accidentally get too close. In a clever move, Polinger never establishes if the plague is real because even if it isn’t, the fear it sows is. 

The remainder of The Plague follows Ben as he tries to reconcile social acceptance with his own moral code. He understands that people shouldn’t be exiled for their differences and yet the idea of losing his place within the hierarchy keeps him up at night. Blunck deftly portrays Ben’s inner turmoil and the anxiety his journey produces.

Polinger deploys jump scares, intimate close-ups (especially of Jake and Ben staring at one another) and elements of body horror to recast these coming-of-age dilemmas as high-stakes, nightmarish challenges. When the director widens his scope, to survey the broader social behaviors on display, The Plague adopts a primal urgency and the film possesses the feverish energy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. In one of those scenes Polinger observes the boys during lunch, excitedly speaking over each other and laughing. The camera ominously cuts (editing is by Henry Hayes) between views of the group and the faces of individual campers. For the most part, they are children having a good time, but if you look closely you can see a flash of panic beneath the cheerful visages.