It is tempting, in times like these, to ascribe to an archetype its particular incarnation, to historicize it one way or another. Such might be the tendency for toxic masculinity of late, as its critics and fanatics alike clamor to mine metaphor out of mere expression. Sometimes these metaphors are there truly by design. In others, expression is hardier and less amenable to ready-made diagnosis. In Charlie Polinger’s lacerating debut, The Plague, a virulent gaggle of preteen boys devise a language and society of their own, superficially integrated into the miasma of suburban adolescence but sharply foreign, one feels, even for its hesitant sycophants. Set in 2003 at a water polo camp largely insulated from the dog days of summer, the film treads the familiar if no less disquieting waters of burgeoning manhood, its cruel performances, and its relentless struggles to conform.
For 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck), plucked from the confines of an unhappy single-parent household and thrust into drab institutional life, interactions with his newfound mates are always on edge, fraught with the tense prospect of saying the wrong thing or deigning to appear vulnerable. Ben’s lanky stature and doe-eyed curiosity might appear easy targets, but Polinger’s vision isn’t that of frat freaks or macho men duking it out ad nauseam. Rather, The Plague spins its own tale of savagery closer in spirit to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies — attesting to the primal impulses latent in the unguarded throes of early socialization — yet remaining wary of imposing a blanket statement on gendered hierarchies and entitlement. Much like Céline Sciamma or Lucile Hadžihalilović’s counterparts from the fairer sex, Polinger is not averse to the violence of both youth and identity proper; his protagonists antagonize one another not solely because of their outwardly immutable gender, but often in spite of it.
The Plague, then, is a nostalgic excavation of childhood trauma, capturing a liminality of time, place, and age which remains tantalizingly current because of how steeped the film is in the rhetoric and codes of its youthful members. Convinced that a plague is afoot and has claimed its latest victim, the eczema-ridden Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), the whole team shuns his leprous form and observes, by way of a kind of initiation process, whether Ben would do the same. While neither Ben nor Eli quite wish to partake in these rituals of social life, the former has less of a say, precisely because of an urgent and predictable desire to fit in. Even less helpful is the boys’ coach (Joel Edgerton), who parades his impotent authority around under the guise of stone-faced snark. The nefarious, frequently jarring world of pubescence and paradox soon disarms Ben, leaving him exposed to the wrath of pack leader Jake (Kayo Martin), whose babyfaced charm — a proto-Tom Holland — belies untold sophistication and a nasty, undefeated streak of what might well be sadism.
If The Plague proves blunt in its ruthless dramatization of the camaraderie that bullying and ostracization inspire, it also thrives in seeing, not without justification, how inane pressures easily override logical considerations, how fragile the social mind is to cult-like manipulation. But lest we get another social-realist hectoring on Hobbes and the manifold dangers of tyranny, Polinger is quick to suspend such intellectual peregrinations for a more visceral immersion into the corporeal, potentially irrational side of our formative years. Set in California yet shot in Romania and almost always confined to the dim environs of the pool and its surrounding prison-like complex, The Plague unspools with an air of taut menace, scored to the shrill staccato vocals which overlay its scenes of downtime with terrible foreboding. No dip in the water feels so out of place, just as no walk through the endless brick-laid campus recalls so vividly the stifling unease of It Follows. The symptoms of its titular malaise eventually cast an ambivalent shadow over the film, rendering its creeping metaphors somewhat ineffectual. But with or without bodily outrage, The Plague’s mental scarring is raw and palpable enough.
DIRECTOR: Charlie Polinger; CAST: Joel Edgerton, Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, Kenny Rasmussen; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: December 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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