The true horror of The Plague doesn’t arise from its titular affliction, but rather the creeping spectre of toxic masculinity which slowly bares its teeth over the 98-minute runtime. Set at a water polo camp in the summer of 2003, the film follows Ben (a star-making turn from Everett Blunck), uprooted from a recently broken home in his native Boston to suffer the pains of crossing the pre-teen threshold surrounded by strangers.
Attempts to fit in with the rest of the boys prove successful, if resulting in taunts at his accent, and a nickname that sticks like cloth to broken skin. Although this need to assimilate, be like all the rest, fills the void of a fragile sense of self, beneath this lies a deep well of empathy expressed in vegetarianism and the assertion he’d find a way to turn all Sith good.
Like watching a social experiment, or a deranged nature documentary, there’s always one cast out of the herd. Here, it’s Eli (played by Kenny Rasmussen, who effortlessly switches from intensity to levity and back again in the same scene). A severe bout of acne and a pervasive back rash have turned him into a pariah. The others claim he has plague pimples, and his leprous body can infect with only a touch. His evident neurodivergence only serves to push him further from his peers, and the bullying is relentless.
Ben’s natural empathy combines with chance encounters, and he begins to develop a friendship with Eli. The two bond over Gollum impressions and mutual self-harm experiences, developing what can equally be read as homoerotic affection, and as two people on the same wavelength discovering a connection. But it’s also what makes Ben vulnerable to the malice and pack mentality of the other boys, and as he compromises himself more and more to fit in, the more Eli comes to represent everything he wants to escape.
As with Carol Morley’s 2014 Falling in which an epidemic of fainting spells spreads through a girl’s school, so ‘the plague’ becomes real through the power and faith invested in it. Ben finds himself afflicted, emerging first with a pimple, then a small patch of rash, a darkening of the eyes, a slow transformation that conjures the glacial creep and inevitability of body horror classics like The Fly. And in moments where Ben frantically checks his body for visible signs of infection, it evokes the abject horror of AIDs, gay and bisexual deaths from which were still high in the early noughties.
This slow sense of dread, of moving towards a moment of violence, is fully realised by Johan Lenox’s score. It meanders from a harshness conjuring the smothering industrial of early BACKXWASH to choral sections that feel closer to Bon Iver. It also draws out the horror lurking beneath the surface, when we’re submerged in the swimming pool, and bodies suspended in the water appear headless. In these haunting subaqueous scenes, the water itself seems alive and watching. Yet it’s we who watch, helpless, as Ben keeps trying to fit in, as the boys escalate from gaslighting and ostracisation to increasingly cruel torments.
With the rise of the manosphere and the success of 2025’s chilling Adolescence, the horror of boyhood is having a moment. Writer-director Charlie Polinger takes a more nuanced approach with his debut feature, using subtle, economic storytelling and precise artistic styling that fully embraces its Kubrick inspiration — and a surprising use of The Lord of the Rings as a subtextual throughline — for a beguiling and honest exploration of boys, men, and the excruciating connective tissue between.
Cycles of male violence and entitlement repeat if unbroken. Boys surrounded by abusive, self-hating, or defeatist male role models, where intimacy is demonised and the only catharsis is found in destruction, will breed more of the same. But as The Plague shows us, it’s not about dancing like no one’s watching, but dancing yourself breathless in the full glare of scrutiny like it’s a spotlight.
DISTRIBUTOR
Vertigo
DIRECTOR
Charlie Polinger
SCREENPLAY
Charlie Polinger
CAST
Everett Blunck
Joel Edgerton
Kenny Rasmussen
DIGITAL
20 April 2026
