The Plague review: a creepy coming of age movie

In Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Mahershala Ali’s drug dealer, Juan, teaches Alex Hibbert’s Chiron how to swim while imparting advice on how best to be a man in this twisted world. A stand-in father figure, Juan is imperfect. His black market business caters to Chiron’s addicted mother, yet this buoyantly intimate scene, borne aloft by the sea’s freedom, helps disconnect masculinity from cruelty.

Alas, water is a harsher elemental force in writer/director Charlie Polinger’s startlingly impressive debut feature, The Plague, with Australian Joel Edgerton’s American water polo coach, Daddy Waggs, a less effective circuit-breaker.

Rumours of the plague

Bound by a cold ring of tiled walls, The Plague’s body of water, an Olympic-sized pool housed within the smothering confines of a brutalist brick architectural edifice, is a gladiatorial space.

Bubbling chaos erupts from the testosterone-flaring forms of tween lads attending a water polo summer camp in 2003 as they plunge into this not-so-sporting cauldron.

Everett Blunck’s awkwardly sweet 12-year-old, Ben, an out-of-towner freshly arrived, is an empathetic vegetarian. He defends the cast-off oddity of Kenny Rasmussen’s Eli, a fellow outsider who refuses to remove his T-shirt in the pool. But the other boys avoid Eli like the plague they say he carries.

They claim he has a skin-warping rash that is highly infectious and will ultimately lead to motor failure if Ben touches him without immediately scrubbing his skin clean. It’s a mean-spirited game that’s far too common in playgrounds.

This puffed-up pageantry of gangly boys, who mercilessly towel-whip one another during locker room roughhousing, is fed by the curly-headed Jake, played by an awfully excellent Kayo Martin. Jake’s cherubic looks belie his devilish demeanour. An unrelenting prat, he’s smart enough to couch his vicious ways in jocularity.

Ben’s good heart can’t hold up under this relentless barrage and when Jake pounces on his slight speech impediment, his survival instinct overrides his sympathy for Eli and his probably-maybe-fictional cooties.

The horror show of adolescence

Like the fainting mania of Anna Rose Holmer’s breathtaking film, The Fits, Polinger’s en pointe portrayal of youthful ferocity allows just the right amount of doubt –and the ambiguity has you wondering if there is a plague on their pool house?

This chilling thought is aided by the glacial creep of cinematographer Steven Breckon’s steady camera. Shooting on glorious 35mm, he captures these shadowy spaces with a prowl, like the stalking of corridors in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or the voyeuristic head of steam that opens Brian De Palma’s Carrie.

We feel it in our bones that we are in for adolescence-as-horror-movie. It’s less overt than in Julia Ducournau’s ravishing Raw, where the emerging sexuality of Garance Marillier’s vet student was wrought explicitly monstrous. While The Plague is ominously spooky – right down to the breathy thrum of Johan Lenox’s vocal incantation-led score – the savagery it reveals is closer in form to the trials faced by Elsie Fisher’s Kayla in the agonising Eighth Grade, with a dash of the gnashing, animalistic menace from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Watch the trailer

Tribal allegiances

Much like Chiron in Moonlight, Ben isn’t the chattiest, but just like Jenkins’ hero, he loosens when in the company of Eli’s kinder soul. The latter is a dab hand at magic tricks, including convincingly severing a finger, and impersonations, from affecting posh English to Gollum’s slippery ‘preciousssss’ hiss. When their cloistered camaraderie is cut short after Ben casts him off, we feel the gut punch.

Rasmussen brings a jolly if wounded heart to Eli, a loner who listens to his Walkman and twirls with a cardboard cut-out of Betty Boop at the co-ed dances the camp holds. Then a poolside incident, in which his body’s natural urges make themselves involuntarily known, sees him howled down by the caterwauling cries of Jake & Co.

One of the brutes, Caden Burris’ bleach-blond and braces-wearing Matt, looks uncannily like the Mad magazine mascot. British actor Elliott Heffernan, who starred in Steve McQueen’s Blitz, is something of a halfway house as Tic Tac. He forms a bond with Ben, but can’t quite bridge the gap to Eli.

The resulting tug-of-war spirals when Eli dances, windmill-like, in a trash-strewn alley where the rampaging lads burst a water pipe after escaping their dorm one night. Eli, in his flailing, sodden freedom, passes the plague onto Ben, kickstarting escalating mayhem.

Natural blues

Blunck brings a quiet wisdom beyond his years to the role of Ben, a boy who does not dare to be different, and who cannot brave the vulgarian vagaries of deliberately cockroach-infested beds or hide his own wet dreams. In refusing to do so, he does become more monstrous.

Polinger’s adeptly judged film indulges in surreally realised moments, like an impossible shot of the pool inverted with its rippling surface somehow simultaneously at the bottom of the pit. But Edgerton’s role as coach is deliberately disappointing.

Daddy Waggs may be a decent man, but he’s also a half-hearted pep talker who’s not up to the task of shutting Jake down. When the coach asks the brat if he’s ever been shamed in front of a group, Jake’s snide rebuttal, ‘That’s exactly what you’re doing right now,’ just about neutralises the grown-up’s threat. Until, that is, a water-born battle with Ben seals the deal in blood and chlorine.

Discombobulating cuts by Australian editor Simon Njoo and Cha Cha Real Smooth splicer Henry Hayes keep us on our toes, as does Lenox’s woozy sound design. Polinger drew on his rediscovered tween journals to fashion this not-quite fantasy of all-too-real bullying of difference. Here, the olympic pool is a place that echoes with the noughties-ubiquitous lullaby of Moby, and The Plague’s enticing siren call threatens to dash these lads on unforgiving shores where their hearts feel so bad.

The Plague is in cinemas 12 March.

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