For whatever reason, movies about adolescence often bathe those memories in golden, nostalgic hues, sentimentalizing painful lessons and viewing them with a fondness only distance can provide. “The Plague,” the debut from the writer and director Charlie Polinger, is about as far from that kind of movie as you can get. Thank goodness.
The boys in “The Plague,” aged 12 and 13, are enrolled in the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp in the summer of 2003. Most of them know each other already, but the newbie Ben (Everett Blunck), recently moved to town after his parents separated, is desperate to be part of the group. The boys’ ringleader is Jake (Kayo Martin); their outcast is Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who has a weird sense of humor, a banger of a Gollum impression and a rash on part of his body that the other boys have decided is “the plague.” If you touch Eli, they say, you’ll get the plague. Don’t go near Eli.
The plague, of course, is as metaphorical as it is semi-literal: Eli is the host to a social plague, and being his friend will mark you as a weird kid too, which is the last thing Ben needs right now. Instead, he spends his days trying to find where he can sneak into the pecking order, observing the other boys as they goof around about things they almost certainly know nothing about (sex, mostly).
Ben understands what most outsiders know instinctively: If you don’t make waves, if you can hold it together long enough without committing some unforgivable error, you’ll probably be absorbed into the group. But in this setting, power dynamics are like shifting sand, and Ben soon discovers he’s standing on some particularly slippery spots.
Everything about the setting of “The Plague” is ordinary — brown and beige-hued hallways, nondescript dorm rooms, run-of-the-mill cafeterias — but Polinger knows just how to turn them ominous, beginning with Johan Lenox’s score, which sounds as if it’s coming from some otherworldly hell. In the very first shot, we’re watching boys tread water in a pool, but hearing rhythmic, guttural sounds vaguely reminiscent of the “Jaws” theme. Something bad is coming.
Using eerie light and muddy shadow, Polinger and his cinematographer, Steven Breckon, put us inside of Ben’s experience of the camp. Sometimes everything’s fine. Other times it feels like a presence might be lurking, something very evil. Is it the plague? Is someone out to get him? Is it all in his imagination?
This is what “The Plague” does best: Its storytelling inhabits a world so heated and confusing to its characters — that is, burgeoning adolescence — that it’s sometimes unclear whether things are actually happening or just in Ben’s head. It starts early, with a trick Eli plays that’s so realistic you’ll squirm, or scream. But that blurry line between the real and the nightmare (exacerbated, no doubt, by the lack of sleep that anyone would get in that dorm room) becomes smudgier, and Ben grows more anxious along with it.
Blunck plays Ben’s wide-eyed devolution from innocent kid to something less contained with a commitment rare for a young actor, but the rest of the water polo campers are played by equally terrific performers. Rasmussen and Martin, in particular, are portraying two very different kind of boys you encounter at that age, the cool kid and the weird kid, and they’re so good that you forget this isn’t a documentary. Similarly, the gaggle of supporting actors around them talk and act exactly the way this crowd would, with catchphrases and boastful fibs and would-you-rather games that could only have sprung from the mind of a 13-year-old boy.
And then there’s their coach, played by Joel Edgerton. The magical teacher trope is so common in this kind of movie — the older, wiser adult who inspires or guides the young protagonists — that it’s jarring, and hilarious, to run into this guy. He is trying to impress upon his young charges the importance of things like teamwork and kindness and thinking ahead and doing the right thing. But in truth, like so many teachers and coaches, he only kind of knows what he’s doing. His inspirational speeches fall flat, and his well-meaning stories fall flat. He’s perfectly written, because to these boys he’s just the adult they have to listen to sometimes, barely relevant to their lives. He’s not really part of their universe.
The most obvious comparison for “The Plague” is “Lord of the Flies.” But this movie has a lot less interest in grand allegory about human nature and war and civilizational structures. Instead it’s recalling what it was like to be young — Polinger has said that the film is based, in part, on his own journals from water polo camp in 2003 — and what a frightening experience it can be. The terror of being different, of breaking out from the pack and having them subsequently eat you, or abandon you: That’s what this one is about, and one boy’s early reference to “leprosy” makes that clear.
Yet it’s also exhilarating, because “The Plague” commits to its narrative arc and then sees it through right to the wild, whirligig end. I won’t spoil it, don’t worry. But let’s just say that this is not a nice, happy movie in which everyone learns a lesson in the end about kindness and sharing and being yourself, the way every movie about teenagers seems to be. It’s not even about finding your “tribe,” so to speak. It’s darker and more feral, either euphoria or a hallucination or both. Which I suppose is a good way to describe what adolescence really can feel like.
The Plague Rated R for a really gross bloody moment, plus a lot of juvenile profanity and chatter about sex. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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