Editor’s Word: This evaluate was initially revealed throughout the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. Unbiased Movie Firm releases “The Plague” in choose theaters on December 24.
The expertise of partaking with a movie can provide you a reference for expressing a private concept that you just didn’t beforehand have the phrases for. This transference makes a moot level of all criticisms that might fairly be leveled on the movie. What do flaws matter, while you stroll out of the cinema realizing how one can lastly say one thing you’ve been craving to say? “The Plague” is stuffed with concepts executed with various levels of resonance. It’s not for everybody. However it might imply so much to individuals like me.
In his debut characteristic, filmmaker Charlie Polinger performs with broad riffs on coming-of-age, physique horror, and bullying genres earlier than paring these themes again to disclose that two 12-year-old boys — and their contrasting approaches to being completely different — are actually the heartfelt preoccupation of the movie.
Set within the sealed world of a water polo coaching camp for boys throughout the summer season of 2003, “The Plague” is each stylized and ascetic. Large, daring swings within the visible language and sound design division alternate with stillness and silence. This interaction between sensual overwhelm and sudden loneliness displays the situation that watchful beginner Ben (Everett Blunck) feels as he processes the irritating social guidelines which will result in his ostracization.
Shot on 35mm by cinematographer Steven Breckon, the intention to create a putting, mysterious, and uneasy ambiance is obvious from the primary body. We start underwater, beneath the floor of a swimming pool. The floor is damaged as a physique cannonballs all the way down to the underside, adopted by a second, a 3rd, a fourth, a fifth … till there are too many to trace.
This introduction to a bunch of 12- and 13-year-old boys as faceless forces of nature will show apt in sure methods, though Polinger is cautious to not make any of them one-dimensional. Whereas there are echoes of “Lord of the Flies” within the society these boys make for themselves — particularly in terrifying and sensible ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) — shifts in views and comedian vignettes imply that “The Plague” by no means settles into one groove. It flirts with being a extra merciless story than it’s; certainly, Polinger’s management over his core curiosity creates intrigue as we surprise, to paraphrase Richard Ayoade in “The Memento Half II,” if he’ll resist the temptation to be apparent.
We’re aligned to the angle of a brand new boy at camp, Ben. Their coach (Joel Edgerton in athleisure) is the one grownup authority and it shortly turns into clear that he’s out of his depth. Within the aftermath of a coaching session, particular person boys yell out brash feedback and the digital camera cuts shortly between close-ups of every face, reframing this post-swim dialog as a website of intense stress. Why is that this lawless brood so undersupervised? Departures from realism in service of heightening the dynamics (while you’re a child attempting to slot in, it feels like there are not any adults round) require the viewer to simply accept the movie on its assured phrase, slightly than interrogating its guidelines.
Two boys emerge because the poles that Ben makes use of to orient himself. There may be Jake, the perma-grinning, smart-mouthed group chief. There may be Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) an autistic-coded child who, Ben is informed, has “the plague.” “These usually are not common pimples, these are plague pimples,” says Jake, as he provides Ben the lowdown on the sport that nobody can afford to choose out of solely. Touching Eli means you need to wash your self instantly, in any other case you’ll have the plague too. The spectacle of the boys fleeing each time Eli nears them, or washing furiously after a pores and skin brush, is painful to behold, nonetheless, Eli isn’t outlined by his victimhood. He’s a full particular person with pursuits that vary from dancing to Gollum impersonations to creating faux blood and pretending to chop off his personal finger to psyche Ben out.
Whereas he serves as a cautionary story to Ben, he additionally serves as an irresistible supply of fascination. Slowly, the movie absorbs us within the existential query of who Ben goes to be. Will he aspect with the dominant tribe and freeze out Eli to slot in? Or can be brazenly associates with Eli and danger making himself as a lot of a goal? Is anybody mentally robust sufficient at 12 to climate dwelling with tormentors?
With a rating that features staccato human voices crying out, Ben strikes by way of the sterile indoor world of a leisure middle, usually resembling a lonely gunslingers because of the Widescreen facet ratio. Regardless of his solitude, there’s at all times an opportunity that he could be being watched, and Jake has an odd method of realizing precisely when he’s been spending time with Eli. The claustrophobia of getting no privateness whereas having no firm is evoked to create a stress cooker surroundings the place violence may erupt at any second.
The plague itself is teased as each an actual and metaphorical assemble. There are shades of Julia Ducournau’s personal debut characteristic “Uncooked” in a skin-bubbling rash, whereas a number of visceral watch-through-the-finger moments blur the road between psychological and bodily bloodshed. All artistic decisions are tailor-made to middle a social-identity disaster and a climactic confrontation lays out what the stakes have been for Ben all alongside. It is a deeply emotional movie in excessive idea clothes, coded to resonate with these of us well-versed within the intuition to betray ourselves with a purpose to be accepted.
One learn on the connection between Ben and Eli is that it’s a relationship between a masked neurodivergent boy and an unmasked one. It is a dynamic I’ve by no means seen earlier than that speaks to my very own inter-tribe struggles as I — recognized as an grownup — typically resent these open to and relaxed with their variations. The largest reveal of “The Plague” is that Eli — not in a “magical autistic” method, however in a refined humanist method — has one thing to show Ben.
It is a movie that harnesses its many offbeat and potent powers in service of a singular pressure of reassurance. I left feeling lighter and extra in a position to unmask.
Grade: B+
“The Plague” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. Unbiased Movie Firm releases it in choose theaters on December 24.
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