The Plague Review

Twelve year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) is spending the summer at water polo camp. The other boys already know each other by the time he gets there, and there’s an established dynamic: Jake (Kayo Martin) is the top dog, and Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), cursed with a gnarly skin complaint, the group’s punching bag. They say his skin problem is ‘the plague’, and anyone who touches him will be infected.

Though he’s just arrived, there’s immediately no safe ground for Ben: either he joins the group and becomes a bully, or sticks up for Eli and is also ostracised. It will prove a formative summer.

The Plague is the debut feature from writer-director Charlie Polinger. He constructs it with visceral intelligence, yanking us in to Ben’s dangerous world and showing the enormous stakes to something that might otherwise be minimised by adults looking back at childhood.

It is a vicious, frightening film, scarier than many out-and-out horror movies. The pervasive lack of safety or kindness, the terrifying fickleness of group dynamics, even several skin-crawling body horror sequences… this is childhood as a war zone, and made all the more scary for how true it feels. Polinger is particularly canny at depicting the gossamer line between affectionate mickey-taking and out-and-out nastiness, and how bullies take advantage of it.

Illuminating his tween hellscape are a remarkable selection of young actors, most of whom are making their movie debuts. Everett Blunck is excellent at navigating Ben’s fear and confusion as he tries to chart a path through bloody waters (at one point, literally!). Kenny Rasmussen makes Eli more than just a victim, giving him an offbeat personality and suggesting a rich inner life. The standout, though, is Kayo Martin, whose cruel smirk alone deserves to earn him a place in the pantheon of all-time movie bullies. While he spends most of the duration as the antagonist, it’s a credit to Polinger’s writing that a subtle info drop towards the end of The Plague complicates the matter in intriguing fashion.

Joel Edgerton plays the sole adult in the film, the water polo coach known as ‘Daddy Wags’. His character is pitched deftly. He’s very aware of the boys’ tendency towards cruelty, and does give Jake a cathartic dressing down when he catches him in a particularly vicious moment. And yet, on a fundamental level, in the midst of everything, he is of no use to Ben. Ben runs away one night, and Daddy Wags retrieves him; the two have a heart-to-heart in a diner, the coach trying to reinforce that things get better after school. But Ben is twelve, and still has an awful lot of school left to go – when every day is a battle, the concept of having so many more years of this to fight through is not reassuring.

Unrelenting in its tension, The Plague isn’t an easy movie to watch, but it is an expertly crafted and deeply felt one. Watch it, and be glad you aren’t twelve any more (and if you are, well – it really does get better!)

★★★★★

The Plague is available on Amazon, Apple TV, Sky Store, YouTube Movies, EE TV and Rakuten now.