Where Diary of a Wimpy Kid showed us Greg Heffley working his way up the middle school social ladder, The Plague turns this innocuous experience of adolescent mingling into a psychological horror.
Starring Joel Edgerton (who also helped produce the film), Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, and Kenny Rasmussen, director Charlie Polinger delivers a compelling examination of interactions and bullying between young boys for an unconventional coming-of-age story.
Taking place in the summer of 2003, Ben (Blunck) arrives at a water polo camp. There, he meets people like the swim coach (Edgerton), and the unspoken leader of the boys Jake (Martin). Jake and the other boys have already selected Eli (Rasmussen) as the target of their bullying, as Eli frequently wears a shirt while swimming to hide a rash, which the boys dub “The Plague.” While Ben acts as a bystander for this bullying, and even spends some time with Eli, the boys begin to target Ben with their cruel tricks, devolving into cruel tricks and he even begins to experience a physical manifestation of the Plague on his own body, prompting even more bullying.
The Plague premiered at Cannes Film Festival in May, where it was nominated for the Camera D’Or and won the award for Best Sound Creation. Its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 23 received the award for Best Picture in Main Competition. More recently, The Plague was shown at Woodstock Film Festival in October, where it won for Best Feature and Best Editing in the Narrative category. The film will receive a limited theater run later this winter, starting December 24th.
In an interview with IndieWire, Polinger reflects on the coming-of-age genre, “I love those movies about boys, though I often feel like a lot of movies about young boys are either a little more sort of broey hangout or a little more nostalgic, kind of biking-around-the-suburbs type of thing.” Mentioning films like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, Polinger says they “capture a social dread and vulnerability of your body and something you don’t see as much with boys because it requires a certain vulnerability to be an object of terror in that way… I was even looking at some sort of dread-filled, ‘Shining’ daylight kinds of horror movies, [with] huge imposing spaces.”
Courtney Howard from Fresh Fiction praised the film for its subject matter, saying, “For those who’ve personally experienced similar dehumanizing torment, The Plague preys on our own feelings of insecurity, powerlessness and grief, awakening an insidious iteration of nostalgia inside us. It’s a subtly harrowing affair, meant to disturb our memories, stirring up flashbacks.”
Watch the official trailer for The Plague above.
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