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The idea of adolescence as a horror story is not new, but it’s given a splashy workout in Charlie Polinger‘s queasily stylish debut feature, in which the swimming pools, lockers rooms and bunk-bed dormitories of a boys’ water polo camp are a puberty petrie dish livid with sinister bacteria. Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, “The Plague” has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in.
Sensitive, 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) comes to the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp in the summer of 2003 as an outsider twice over. He’s not only joining after the second session has started, he’s also a new arrival to the area. And, as we understand from an early conversation with his affable but ineffectual coach (Joel Edgerton, who also produces) a reluctant one: there’s hurt in the studied neutrality of his tone when he describes how his mother uprooted their lives to be with her new lover. Perhaps the wrenching change-up of father figure fuels Ben’s anxiety to fit in, but also maybe that’s just the way he is. When one of the kids’ endless games of would-you-rather makes him choose between “not fucking a dog but having everyone think you did, or fucking a dog and no one knows,” Ben opts for, well, screwing the pooch.
In any wolf pack, the Alpha is obvious and even among these cubs, Jake (a superb Kayo Martin) is easily identifiable as the ringleader. Deceptively cherubic beneath a shock of tousled strawberry blonde hair, and wearing a surprisingly adult expression of skeptical watchfulness, Jake is initially friendly enough to the newcomer — at least once Ben begins answering to the nickname “Soppy,” devised after Jake picks up on his very minor speech impediment.
There’s an easier target for Jake’s lazy but keen-eyed ridicule. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) was presumably already an oddball — into magic tricks and solo flailing dance moves and lurching non-sequitur conversation — even before he developed a disfiguring skin complaint. The angry-looking rash that covers his arms and torso is probably some sort of eczema or contact dermatitis, but the boys are still of an age to be fascinated by lepers and curses and so Jake declares it “the plague.” Eli is ostracized, to the point that all the kids dive for another cafeteria table if he so much as pulls up a chair.
Good-natured Ben, in the throes of a panicky uncertainty that from the outside is sweetly poignant, if only because it will be gone in a year or a month or a minute, feels for Eli’s predicament— possibly more than the quite contentedly peculiar Eli does for himself. But as he barely has enough social capital to guarantee his own acceptance into Jake’s circle, Ben befriends the outcast cautiously, away from prying eyes. It’s fine to make taboo transgressions if nobody knows about it.
DP Steven Breckon punctuates “The Plague” with interludes of woozy underwater photography, in which the boys’ bodies dagger into the pool and then tread water, resembling so many headless sea horses. Sometimes, while Johan Lenox’s excellent, ’70s horror-inflected, nightmare-choir score reaches a bombastic crescendo, the girls of the synchronized swimming class who share the pool and fire the boys’ crude erotic imaginings, are shown inverted, so they appear to be dancing floatily across the water’s underside surface. These subaquatic symphonies give a touch of the phantasmagoric to a milieu that’s otherwise cleverly recreated from the banal remembered details of an early noughties childhood: the Capri-Suns, the pop tunes, that brief phase where kids believe that smoking kitchen-cupboard nutmeg will get them high.
Perhaps too the subjective nature of Polinger’s memory of a time when the peer-group dynamic was so much more influential than any peripheral authority figure, accounts for why these kids are so often unconstrained by adult supervision. Jake naturally takes advantage of that freedom to continue his offhand reign of terror, one he can maintain without ever really lifting a finger. Almost all of the violence in “The Plague” is self-inflicted and therefore easily disavowed by this tweenaged tyrant – a character so vivid that it’s tempting to imagine a more provocative movie told from the bully’s perspective. But as “The Plague” ramps up to an impressively eerie, body-horror-styled finale, it takes a rather more expected turn toward a significant, if hardly triumphal moment of personal growth for unhappy camper Ben. Teetering on the brink of adult society with its own bewilderingly insidious notions about masculinity and conformity, you can dive in or you can be pushed, and it’s only then you can know if you’ll sink or swim.
English (US) ·