Exploring Lord of the Flies-esque themes of conformity, loss of innocence and violence, Charlie Polinger’s directorial debut The Plague, premiering at 2025’s Cannes Film Festival, utilizes a vast and creative well of sonic and visual tension to depict the horrors of boyhood and adolescence. Attending a water polo camp over the summer of 2003 with camp leader affectionately known as Daddy Wags (played by Joel Edgerton), Ben (Everett Blunck) blends in with the more boisterous boys in attendance yet also lends sympathy for Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), the quiet misfit of the group. Deemed to be contaminated with ‘the plague’, Eli is outed for the visibly large rashes and pimples covering his skin with nobody daring to go near him for fear of also getting infected. While considered a film in the ‘body-horror’ genre, questions of the plague actually being real are less imperative than the notions of hierarchy and groupthink in the camp’s collective consciousness.

Drenched in an ominous score by Johan Lenox, the film aural and visual choices reel in its horror elements. Slow paced splaying limbs resistant against water, long shots of dark, echoing hallways, and limited in its dialogue all create a foreboding sense of dread throughout most of the film’s runtime. The sparseness of conversation between the boys doesn’t derail from the very realistic chatter between the characters, creating the sense that the dialogue was entirely unscripted. Close ups of the boys’ faces and expressions captures their very real and very subtle intimidations and anxieties navigating their role within the group as well as independently. Lenox’s haunting and breathy sounding chants create a near suffocating landscape of claustrophobia, a sensory experience of drowning even while outside the realm of the swimming pool. 

Eli’s character is one more fully fleshed out than the rest, an air of self-assurance about him despite the taunting and isolation he faces on a regular basis. A flailing dance routine, an act indicating some degree of comfort with your own physicality, is the least likely act of self-expression teenage boys would seek out, yet Eli does so unabashedly one night, garnering both laughs yet a degree of admiration from his peers. However, what’s different is meant to be picked on and diminished in the world of adolescence, and Ben teeters between wanting to gain the acceptance of the rest of his water polo team as well as discovering more what Eli is about. A few directorial choices throughout the film do feel out of character and and tonally awkward (including a slightly more melodramatic talk at a diner between Ben and his camp counselor). Despite some stumbles, Polinger still knows exactly how to get under the audience’s skin, reminding us of all the painful adolescent anxieties that take place during overnight summer camps and behind closed doors in locker rooms. Considering this degree of talent from Polinger’s feature length debut, I’m very excited to see what he’ll work on next.