Writer and director Charlie Polinger has not necessarily landed on anything original with The Plague. Set in the blue-tinged nostalgia of water-polo sleepaway camp in 2003, his horror-flecked feature film debut explores a relatively cliche, and often reductively illustrated, cultural fascination.
But it’s the chillingly precise, honest exploration of childhood that easily raises it to “best-of” status.
Painfully sensitive tween Ben (Everett Blunck) is buffeted by the twin motivations of pubescent masculinity: the inherent desire to avoid conflict and be affectionate with his peers, butting up against the external pressure to be accepted by a group — even if that means performatively excluding and attacking the “freaks” on the fringes.
This conflict is driven by chubby-cheeked sociopath Jake (Kayo Martin), the 12-year-old ringleader of our marauding pack of swimmers, effectively left to their own devices, save for the occasional oversight of counselor and coach “Daddy Wags” (Joel Edgerton).
But when he’s away, the fangs come out. In what anyone who experienced early 2000s boyhood would call an uncanny performance, Jake controls his followers with feigned indifference, preening contempt and the terrifying power to laser-focus and therefore weaponize the jeering of his followers.
That offhanded malevolence — innocent to an adult but apocalyptic to an acne-sprouting middle schooler — comes out early. And comes out especially when newcomer Ben sits at a lunch table of the relative old hands, who are aggressively debating a fairly ridiculous “Would you rather?” question.
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Trying to break in, Ben asks whether he can choose neither scenario — though it’s mostly lost in the distracted boys’ screechy cries. But Jake notices something. Looking up with sudden, shark-eyed hunger, he waits. Then, like The Shining’s Jack Nicholson advancing up the stairs to a cornered Shelley Duvall, he breaks out into an expectant grin.
“What’d you just say?” he asks, as the rest of the table turns to stare.
Ben, unprepared for the attention, lets out a nervous laugh.
“What?”
Jake grins wider.
“You said, ‘Can you make it ‘sop.'”
What follows is a squirm-inducing interrogation; all the other boys silently watch as Jake sing-songily forces Ben to admit he can’t pronounce “stop.” Then, an eruption of laughter, as Jake’s role of gatekeeper and powerbroker is reinforced — particularly when he succeeds in coercing Ben to laugh along at his own embarrassment.
Of course, this alone wouldn’t be enough plot for an entire movie. We’re soon introduced to Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), an ostracized and unfortunate camper stricken with a skin condition the rest simply call “the plague.” The condition, Jake giddily explains, gives you plague pimples on a plague face. An infectious disease, it eventually breaks down your motor skills, removes your ability to speak and “turns your brain to baby food.”
The questionable authenticity of the plague aside, it’s a frighteningly real tool. It’s a way for Polinger to seed the body-horror visual cues that steer this beautifully shot drama into genre-film territory. And it’s a way for Jake to condition and test the boys, then pit them against one another: to exploit their own deathly fear of being singled out into a cruel revelry that spreads and burns as uncontrollably as a forest fire.
And perhaps to question whether kids — and by extension, all humans — are really just like that. To ask whether we’re all so scared of being isolated, we unavoidably slide into violence when removed from the mediating stricture of society.
This is obviously where Polinger is most at risk of sliding into cliche; The Plague has already been compared to the 1954 novel Lord of the Flies in virtually every review that mentions it. It isn’t hard to reason why: “unminded children immediately revert to savage brutality” as subversive cultural commentary is about as original an idea as having a character exclaim, “He’s right behind us, isn’t he?”
‘Real-life Lord of the Flies’
And after William Golding’s Flies examined the innate human impulse toward cruelty by contrasting the senselessness of the Second World War with a group of unsupervised boys immediately tumbling into deadly conflict, society became a little obsessed with the concept.
Sociologist Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment, in which he goaded two forest-marooned groups of boys into fighting, is still often dubbed a “real-life Lord of the Flies.”Even though he and his staff needed to provoke and outright trick the kids into attacking one another to prove his theories around tribalistic violence. Not to mention it followed an earlier, failed experiment where the children outrightly refused to fight at all.
Then there were the Tongan castaways, six schoolboys who found themselves stranded on a remote rocky island for over a year. Also often compared to Lord of the Flies, those youths instead spent most of their time farming, joking around and helping one another survive.
And there were reality shows like Boys Alone, Boys and Girls Alone and Kid Nation, which mined the seemingly endlessly fascinating question of how anarchic kids get when they aren’t forced to behave. Each saw scattered elements of bullying and chaos, but more due to allegations of child abuse, neglect and serious manipulation tactics from adults than an intractable childhood desire to set up organized, warring gangs.
That’s not to say humans lack the ability to hate outsiders. Arguing the opposite is our virtually disintegrating world order, peppered with a seemingly unending string of aggressive attacks. But after Lord of the Flies started the discussion, it has long since ended. Other entries — like classic film Battle Royale — may have occasionally found new, fertile ground by weaving in commentary on Japanese militarism. But solely and directly using children as metaphorical stand-ins for adults’ barbarism reads, at best, as a bit reductive. At worst, it’s inaccurate.
So how does The Plague avoid that problem? First off, through the acting. Blunck is a revelation: Already having shown off his comedic chops in 2025’s Griffin in Summer, his nuanced job here cements him as one of the most talented child actors of his generation. Meanwhile, Martin — discovered just a few years ago in a somewhat absurd street interview — struts through one of the most hauntingly realistic depictions of a mind game-playing, deceptively insecure bully ever put to screen.
Polinger accomplished that by trusting his cast; large portions of the dialogue were improvised, while he spent time working directly with his child actors to build their characters. Alongside gorgeous cinematography — and a hypnotically unsettling score by Johan Lenox — this is where The Plague shines.
Unlike many other Flies clones, The Plague doesn’t use children as analogues to uncover some hidden truth about grown-ups. Instead, it focuses on the unmoored experience of adolescence, the nonexistent logic in growing up and the often unrewarding costs of maintaining what you thought were your principles.
And, as The Plague proves, there’s little more horrifying than that.
