The Plague

Splash into the deep end of social anxiety!

It’s said that you sometimes get from a film what you take into it. When I was twelve, my parents sent their quiet, reserved son to a week-long overnight church camp where I roomed with a group of seven or so boys from another church, none of whom I knew. It was a nightmare. As the only outsider I was an obvious target for small cruelties masked as practical jokes, excluded and isolated except when the room wanted a punching bag to bond over. I didn’t sleep for the first two days. I hadn’t thought about that miserable week in years, but I found unpleasant memories being dredged up while watching The Plague, a taut, all-too-relatable adolescent drama about fitting in amongst bullies.

Our protagonist is Ben, a socially anxious twelve year old attending a water polo summer camp in 2003. At lunch on the first day, he works up the courage to sit with his fellow campers, awkwardly trying to join their banter. Almost immediately Ben is needled by the group’s de facto leader Jake when he inadvertently reveals a speech impediment (he’s unable to pronounce the “t” in the word stop). Nicknamed “Soppy” and jeered at by the table, things are going pretty poorly for Ben until the arrival of another student, at whose mere presence the entire group scrambles to change seats. Eli, an autistic kid with a skin rash, has “the plague.” No one will go near him, or even speak to him. For Ben, joining in the game of Eli’s ostracization is a ready deflection from his own differences. Caught between his kindness and their cruelty, the need to fit in wins out.

Despite the marketing, The Plague is not a horror movie though you may find Ben and Eli’s twin plights plenty anxiety inducing, especially if you’ve been the subject of such organized bullying yourself. Ben will not stay in Jake and his followers’ favor for long and while Eli seems to be largely unbothered, Ben feels the psychological torment acutely, at once in conflict with the boys and wracked by panic and paranoia. I was struck by how authentic it all felt. For teenaged actors, these performances are remarkable; Everett Blunck (Ben), Kayo Martin (Jake), and Kenny Rasmussen (Eli) make a strong, believable central trio but across the entire group director Charlie Polinger manages to conjure up the recognizable spirit of obnoxious teenage friend groups at their most jubilant, carefree and (eventually) toxic. Not bad at all for a feature debut.

For a film that isn’t really a horror movie, it sure does look like one. The Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp is held in a school and frequently shot like a dungeon. The camera drifts through long, dark corridors with flickering lights. Characters cling to walls as they wander at night. Ben is trapped here, and as things go bad the camera pushes closer to his face, trapping him in the frame, too. Less successful is the score. Scenes are accentuated by (and often drowned in) heavy vocalizations. Low voices blast long, sustained notes, high ones chant in a frenzy. They sing and sigh and gasp energetically but it’s poured on distractingly thick in places.

I’m a little unsure about the ending which (without spoiling anything) feels a little too neat after the outpouring of resentment the film builds to for most of its 95 minute runtime. After some hair-raising dramatic punctuation, the resolution is dispensed with rather quickly. There’s a slight incongruity between these final scenes, as if some connective emotional matter is missing. But I assure you this is a minor nitpick. The ride is well-worth taking.

The Plague keenly captures one of the most uncomfortable instincts of adolescent life: above all else, fit in. For Ben, it’s a survival instinct with self-destructive power. It’s easy now, as an adult, to think he should have seen his “friend’s” turn coming or to dismiss Ben as making bad decisions. But that’s a view nearly thirty years removed from my own bad week at camp, at the end of a journey Ben is only starting. What might I have done, all those years ago, to make the bullying stop? Or given the chance, to prevent it from ever starting? Looking back, The Plague’s real horror may lie in those answers.