The Plague

4/5

The Plague is an exceptional debut from Charlie Polinger, tapping into something genuinely unnerving: the idea that simply surviving adolescence is, in its own way, a kind of horror. We all go through it, most of us make it out the other side, but it’s rare to see a film capture that experience with this much clarity (and cruelty).

Polinger drops us into a water polo camp, which might as well be a nightmare factory. The boys are loosely supervised, girls exist mostly as rumor, and cruelty is already being passed down like a learned language. The film never spells this out, it just lets you feel it. At a lean 90 minutes, The Plague is all precision, using the grammar of a horror movie to show how ordinary boys can become monstrous without any supernatural help at all.

“Hurt people hurt people” and the final stretch is genuinely shocking and unexpectedly moving, as the story allows its young protagonist a chance to break free from the cycle—even if it comes at a devastating cost. It’s a brutal, bracing reminder of how early we learn the worst parts of ourselves

.