I recently visited a movie theater to watch the gory survivalist film Send Help directed by accomplished horror savant, Sam Raimi (“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” 2022). Send Help revels in its messiness with sand, blood, seawater, sweat, vomit, flesh, and fruit juices all thrown together. (It also has plenty of saliva.) But the film itself is so horribly messy, silly, and disappointing, I left the movie theater in a worse mood than when I arrived. The night after watching “Send Help,”
I resolved to find something else to watch at home. I needed something to revive my love of movies and feel better about the current state of cinema. I found it in a gem of the independent film “The Plague.”
“The Plague” was released in selected theaters at the end of December 2025 and is now available for everyone to watch on Amazon Prime. At a summer water polo camp for 12 and 13-year-old boys away from their families, awkward and shy Ben (Everett Blunck, “Griffin in Summer,” 2024) tries to make friends with his fellow campmates.
But Ben is told to avoid one boy named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen, “Christmas Again,” 2021) because Eli has “the plague”. If anyone touches Eli, they’ll get the plague too. So Ben has to be careful navigating the hierarchy of popularity and control in a group of sprouting masculinity.
Young boys learning sports together could easily be a raucous, family-friendly, coming-of-age film about teamwork and boyhood. But “The Plague” presents this story like a tense psychological thriller with long empty hallways, disorienting underwater shots, and spooky music comprised of ghostly overlapping voices. This film explores childhood’s dark side with bullying, ridicule, exclusion, and its emotionally damaging effects.
I was completely transfixed with this film. It’s one of the best I’ve seen in the past year. It carefully combines the cutting efficiency of bullying with the sensitive inner lives of boys. The young actors give such vulnerable, realistic, startling performances. Setting it in 2003 is clever and subtle. Without any social media or a cell phone in everyone’s pocket, the bullying and ostracizing is mental, pushing the young boys to react more and more violently.
The kicking and splashing in the water evokes ideas of young boys as unpredictable savage beasts targeting their prey with ruthless acuity and taking audiences into captivating emotional spaces. “The Plague” is similar to other forcefully focused childhood dramas, “Playground” (2021) and “Close” (2022) (both from Belgium).
This film feels so culturally relevant, because we can see examples of this bullying, hive mind behavior in real life almost every day on whatever screen you choose. It gracefully, and gradually, shows the anxiety, self-doubt, and anger that grows from ridicule. It also slowly blurs the line between play and reality and how seemingly harmless myths can take hold of a child’s identity.
It’s ultimately a sobering allegory of tribalism and identity politics. Even boys struggle with feeling uncomfortable in their bodies and not being included in group activities.
“The Plague” is going to stay with me for a long time. It’s the first feature film by American writer/director Charlie Polinger. He explained in various interviews this film is partly inspired from his own summer camp experiences as a child. You better believe I will be first in line to watch his next film.