Michael Fairbanks
I viscerally remember my childhood bully. He wasn’t a physical threat to me. The torture was psychological. For a time, he was a close friend and neighbor. One random day, he decided to start cruelly teasing me whenever he had the chance. In adulthood, I don’t really linger on the actual insults themselves. Most memories of the horrible things said have been successfully repressed. Instead, I think about the maniacal pre-teen laugh he’d bellow out when the whole school bus was pointing at me, and the sheer joy in his eyes that came from my misery. The anger I felt knowing that lashing out at him would only make it worse. These are the sensations that writer-director Charlie Polinger masterfully turns into horror cinema in The Plague, a film that unapologetically tackles the demonic insecurity of young boys with stomach-turning accuracy.
The story is set in 2003, a peak era for bullying, at a boys water polo camp led by coach “Daddy Wags,” played by Joel Edgerton. Ben (Everett Blunck) is a transplant from Boston who hopes to find some community amongst his fellow young athletes. Unfortunately, they’re all jerks. He quickly learns about their relentless torment of Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a withdrawn young man on the spectrum. The other boys, led by ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin), tease Eli about a nasty rash on his back. They dub it “The Plague” and insist that if anyone goes near him, they will catch it. Desperate to connect with someone, Ben strikes up a friendship with Eli that, in turn, leads to disastrous social consequences.
Charlie Polinger (Good People) sets an impeccably scummy atmosphere in The Plague. The camp may be inside a conventional community center, but within this film, it becomes a prison. The changing rooms and saunas are confined, where there is someone around every corner ready to snicker at Ben or Eli. The cabins are almost always pitch black, leaving us unsure if we’re about to hear a horrifically inexperienced conversation about sex or witness a traumatizing prank.
When the team plays water polo, there’s no fun to be had. It is just a vehicle to get all of their hormonal rage out. In fact, there’s only one opening scene where Daddy Wags gets to teach anything about the sport, and the boys immediately draw a penis on his whiteboard. He struggles to connect with them. Mostly, he just reacts with sheer aggravation when faced with scenarios like Eli getting laughed out of the pool room for accidentally getting an erection when the girls team visits. In context, it is mundane pre-teen movie business, but in Polinger’s hands each of these moments leave the deep-seated damage on us matching the children in question.
The Plague could’ve easily been derailed by a weak ensemble of young actors who didn’t sell the premise. Thankfully, Polinger has discovered some remarkable talent here. Everett Blunck (Griffin in Summer) makes for a deeply empathetic victim. He’s a nice kid who is trying his best to game the situation and be friends with everyone, but no matter what he tries, it just doesn’t take. We share his frustration and, ultimately, his delirium as one mortifying social interaction after another takes hold of him. Kayo Martin, a 15-year-old multi-discipline athlete who is trying his hand at acting while training for the Olympics, has a malevolent charisma on par with an adult. He’s the kid who is both cruel and smart, knowing exactly how to make the whole room of young lemmings laugh while still gaslighting his targets into thinking he’s not at fault. Martin portrays one of the best villains of the year, and is a talent who may very well be everywhere once he is older. Kenny Rasmussen (TV’s Work in Progress) gives us an unvarnished outcast. He is clearly in need of help that is simply not accessible to him at a water polo camp. His character often speaks in strange voices and says random jokes that do not align with what he’s being asked.
On that note, Joel Edgerton (Train Dreams) provides sturdy support as a man who has clearly dealt with hundreds of little monsters over the years. He can only hope that the kindness he extends to the kids who need it helps even a little. A more conventional movie than The Plague would’ve made him into the protagonist, constantly following him home as he rants to his spouse about how he just doesn’t understand kids these days. Instead, he lingers in and out of the story as his shifts come and go, empathetic but ultimately ineffective.
The Plague does not pat the audience on the back to remind them that “It gets better.” The film ends on a brutal note that foreshadows how these kids are only going to spiral towards more trouble. Yet, I think that if I had stumbled upon it when I was facing similar issues, it might’ve comforted me more than the pep talks my parents and teachers tried to give me. Sometimes, we need to acknowledge that childhood can be deeply bleak. In an age where teens and pre-teens are given full access to the weight of the world at their fingertips, stories like The Plague may end up being the ones they connect to most.
