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Mary Pickford 9
By Robert St. Martin
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/1/26 – Charlie Polinger’s The Plague, (USA/Romania) is a psychological coming-of-age thriller about a group of middle school boys at a summer water polo training camp. Trapped within an uncomfortably familiar looking American school, the boys swim, bond, and inflict unspeakable cruelty. “Childhood is a disease, a sickness that you grow out of.” That quote, attributed to William Golding, would seem to be the jumping-off point in The Plague for an exploration of teenage social hierarchy at an all-boys athletic camp. Polinger, who said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival that his film was inspired by journals he kept during a summer camp he attended in 2003. But it’s relevant to consider the film within contemporary discussions about troubled boyhood. The Plague has been included in the line-up of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, beginning on Saturday, January 3, 2026. For dates, times, venues, see below.
Saturated with the type of pre-adolescent provocations usually reserved for young girls in cinema, writer-director Charlie Polinger’s feature debut takes notes from Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, as well as from Catherine Breillat and Céline Sciamma, longtime doyennes of coming-of-age terreur. But Polinger’s visual and thematic touchstones also include such hypermasculine visions of alienation as Claire Denis’s Beau Travail and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
Set in the summer of 2003 at the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp, the story primarily follows 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck), a newcomer and relative outsider. He joins the camp after it has already begun, albeit reluctantly, as we learn in an early conversation with the team coach (Joel Edgerton) why he has moved from Boston to the suburbs.
Still processing the pain of the move and his parents’ recent break-up, Ben is desperate to fit in with the other kids and be part of the wider wolf pack, shown early on through his eager attempts to join their endless would-you-rather games. The film was actually shot in Romania in an athletic facility that is a stand-in for an American youth sports complex from 20 years ago.
The parallel to Golding’s Lord of the Flies abound and there is an alpha male named Jake (Kayo Martin). We do not get much backstory for him, but we learn that his older brother is an elite water polo player, a detail that instantly makes Jake more impressive and the kind of kid everyone wants to be friends with.
Jake is initially welcoming toward Ben, though only after he accepts the cruel nickname “Soppy,” given to him for a very minor speech impediment (due to his Boston origins), a name that sticks for the rest of the film.
Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a boy who is clearly different from the others and shows autistic traits that are handled with care. Fascinated by magic tricks and spontaneous solo dance moves, Eli does not fit in with what the group considers “normal.” To make matters worse, he has developed an angry-looking rash that resembles eczema or dermatitis. The boys cruelly nickname it “the plague,” making Eli completely isolated and the constant target of their torment.
Eli seems used to the ostracization; he is a proudly nerdy boy who wears a long-sleeved swim shirt around the pool and would rather waltz with a cardboard cutout of a cartoon woman at the school dance than approach one of the girls. His unabashed sense of self both intrigues and repulses Ben, who doesn’t believe in the plague but is terrified when he realizes that the truth doesn’t matter to anyone but himself.
As Ben starts experiencing plague-like symptoms, an itchy red rash and pimples, he begs the others, “The plague isn’t real. There’s nothing wrong with me.” The plague is just the external manifestation of otherness or uncoolness. This horror of physical and emotional exposure permeates the film: there is the constant adolescent fear that something is deeply and irredeemably wrong with you, and everyone else can see it.
As Ben shifts between pitying Eli to feeling anger at his new friend’s ambivalence toward fitting in, Blunck is tasked with handling a huge range of emotional beats. From jeering cafeteria lunches to group masturbation sessions and sadistic pranks, Ben is at once discomforted by and drawn to his cohorts’ social rituals. Emblematized by the boys’ coach (Joel Egerton), authority figures are pitifully ill-equipped to deal with or alleviate Ben’s pain, and The Plague is vividly, terrifyingly attuned to the way children create a social order that resists sensible adult intrusion and influence.
Sound, cinematography, and expertly written dialogue weave together to create a near-seamless viewing experience as enthralling as it is horrifying. Powerful drum beats, horror movie strings, and thrumming synths mix with a soundscape, designed by Damian Volpe, that is composed predominantly of water noises: the constant hiss of locker room showers, and the echoes of people in the pool. These noises emphasize the abjection in banal, familiar spaces, especially the locker room. Acomparison to Carrie comes to mind as we watch the boys shove each other under the frigid spray and pull away from those they believe have “the plague,” their faces contorted in mockery.
Washed out locker rooms, shadowy hallways, fluorescent cafeterias, and neon vending machines become horrifying in a flash, quiet pans are interrupted by characters running frantically or shouting menacing words. During our brief moments outside the school, we’re taken to other sites of mundane Americana, like a sticky late-night restaurant that still has a payphone on the wall. Each part of the setting is captured through slow pans or extreme close-ups, with the work of cinematographer Steven Beckon.
Continual use of close-ups focus on micro-behaviors that bring the characters to life, neuroses and all. Many moments focus on Ben’s nervous sideways glances or bloody nail beds while the boys’ jeering and taunts echo in the background. A close-up of his shaky hands smashing the buttons of the payphone shows us how desperate for escape he is. Other shots, like a close-up of a jar of squirming cockroaches, represent the ickiness of adolescence, a time that is both intensely practiced and affected, and yet utterly inevitable and natural.
There’s so much that the boys can never say to each other. Ben describes a sexual fantasy about one of the girls at the camp, which he invents on the spot while his eyes dart wildly around the room. The film is set in 2003, but the boys’ interactions with each other are, unfortunately, timeless. They posture about how many “bitches” they get and play crude games of would you rather. They sneak out of the school to throw a party that’s really an opportunity to release the tension they can’t express. As they scream, smash old furniture, and break open a water pipe that bursts all over the street, the sense of catharsis is as needed for the viewer after an hour of nonstop tension as it is for the characters.
If you can remember how you felt and acted at age thirteen, you will recognize these characters, and hate and feel for them in equal measure as you once did your classmates in middle school. The idea of “locker room talk” will be chilling, despite our characters’ youth (They are clearly only play-acting adulthood). Cultural critics speculate about the so-called “male loneliness epidemic,” or this salivating eagerness to discard “woke” culture. As The Plague shows, misogynistic posturing and violence is not a new threat to young men. Instead, it’s a very old one. Add to it the stigma generally associated with extreme acme, which has often been the troubling experience of adolescent boys and girls. The film is a stark reminder of just how difficult it can be to grow up as an adolescent boy.
What makes The Plague stand out in a year of projects and analysis about these issues is the empathy it extends to every character, and the hope it gives us that they can one day break free and live as Ben so clearly wants to, in a kinder and more open way. In the final scenes at a school dance, we see Ben confront Eli’s illusions about his seemingly self-absorbed isolation and, after a brutal act of self-hurt by Eli, Ben tries to find a new, independent part of himself that does not require acceptance by his peers. Returning to the dance in the gymnasium, he begins moving and frantically dancing to his own beat, in a way reminiscent of Denis Lavant at the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.
Director Charlie Polinger is known for Fuck Me, Richard (2023) and The Masque of the Red Death. Showings of The Plague at the Palm Springs International Film Festival: SATURDAY, JANUARY 3, 2026, at 7:45 PM, at the ARCO Theatre (Palm Canyon Theatre); SUNDAY, JANUARY 4, 2026, at 2:00 PM, at the Palm Springs Cultural Center; MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 2026, at 7:00 PM, in Festival Theaters 1. Tickets are available for all three screenings at: https://www.psfilmfest.org/film-festival-2026/film-finder/the-plague
