Charlie Polinger’s “The Plague” brought back many memories I had hoped long drowned in the abandoned backwaters of my mind, secret chambers within which still linger the hooked barbs and snide judgments which only children seem capable of inflicting. There are few cruelties in this world more lasting than that of one child to another, few indignities more cutting than the spiteful snicker of peers toward a lone outcast who didn’t have the good sense to know they were the butt of the joke. “The Plague” is a horror story that dares to represent accurately the psychological ravages of growing up, of the feelings steeped amid the forgotten shallows of our past, when adolescence felt like an eternity we were perhaps not meant to survive without becoming mortally wounded in the process.
Young Ben ( Everett Blunck) is new to town and has been shuffled off to a Water Polo based sleep-away camp with about a dozen boys his age, all under the constant tutelage of their well-meaning, yet exhausted coach (Joel Edgerton). A kind, but socially awkward kid, Ben struggles to get a feel for his companions, mostly veterans of previous camps, who have developed a clique based mostly on grandiose pronouncements about their questionable understanding of unknown sex acts. Ben receives his fair share of ribbing and mockery from the group, though not nearly as much as the true outsider of the camp, Eli, referred to as “The Plague” because of the seemingly unnatural collection of rashes that cover his torso and face. That Eli is different is inarguable; the cause of his othering is left for debate. Is he autistic? Does he have ADHD? Is he simply sheltered and uninterested in athletics? These questions are never answered, but the boys at the camp are quick to inform Ben that “The Plague” is contagious and advise him to keep his distance. Any physical contact with Eli requires a panicked washing in fear of infection. Even eating lunch near his table risks spreading the pestilence. While Ben wants to be liked and accepted, he can’t help be be drawn to “The Plague”; perhaps because he has more in common with the musical theater and “Lord of the Rings” obsessed Eli than any of the rest. But after an act of kindness requires him to touch Eli’s rash, Ben is soon branded as having “The Plague” as well, and discovers compassion has no home in the realms of teenage boys. They are, in fact, ravenous jackals eager for torment who prefer to play with their food in the manner a cat would a wounded rodent, mercilessly, relentlessly, and to the death.
Young boys really are a pox upon this Earth, aren’t they? “The Plague” understands this as well as any film I’ve ever seen and does not shy away from how disgusting and vile they can be to one another. For them, cruelty is no less than an inevitable rite of passage, as necessary as breathing and as corrosive as cancer. The only choice one has is to become the one inflicting the punishment or relent to their role as the passive victim; there is little middle ground. An early sequence in the film shows Ben being mocked for a slight speech impediment, yet still laughing along with his own public flagellation as if it were all in good fun. That self-deprecating laughter scraped against the jagged edges of my soul, its timbre all too familiar and surgical in its ability to send me back to a time years ago at school when my “friends” were all writing funny phrases on their backpacks, and I wanted to be included. So I allowed them to take turns writing hurtful insults on my bag with a marker, laughing as they laughed in the hopes that my good nature would grant me the acceptance I was desperate to earn. Later that night, I tried using a Sharpie to draw over their taunts, only making the black stain of my shame all the more prominent and permanent. I had offered myself upon their altar for evisceration, in the hopes my suffering would yield salvation. It never did for me, as it never does for Ben, whose flailing attempts to gain some purchase on a rapidly deteriorating sense of self are as fruitless as his ability to forestall the spreading of “The Plague” across his own body. “‘The Plague’ isn’t real”, he tells himself, but can he be so sure? Reality is quite malleable when you’re twelve, easily corrupted and confused. I remember being told when I was eleven that Powerade Lemon Lime was made of human urine. That didn’t seem true, but how could I be so sure? Why would someone lie to me about that? Perhaps ‘The Plague’ has always been real, and perhaps it has already infected us all.
The opening frames of the movie set an ominous tone for what is to come, as a dozen boys dive into the pool to begin an exercise of treading water without the use of their hands. What we, the audience, see are twelve decapitated bodies flailing for purchase, desperate to keep from becoming subsumed by the depths. I couldn’t help but think of T.S. Eliot’s haunting ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” How Pollinger frames the boys’ panicked attempts to remain aloft contrasts starkly with a later sequence where the girls at this same camp are learning the finer art of synchronized swimming. Their sequences are balletic, otherworldly, as they are shown “upside down” with their feet fluttering near the surface of the water and their heads precariously inverted, yet somehow serene. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” wrote Eliot, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” The loneliness of adolescence lies potent across each of the boys of “The Plague”, not just Ben and Eli, but the bullies as well. Though Edgerton’s empathetic coach tries what he can to convince Ben that these years will pass, that there are better times at childhood’s end, his words fall on deaf ears, as similar advice always does for better or for worse. Finally, as the sum total of Ben’s anguish explodes upon the film’s climax with bloody consequences, we are left unsure what fate ultimately befalls him. That “The Plague” has overtaken him is inarguable. What growth he might have taken from its infection, we can only assume. The film is set in 2003, which means he would be around 35 or so now, not much older than me. I just hope he made it through the doldrums in one piece.
There is a universe where “The Plague” is more stylized and arch in a manner befitting the great Italian masters like Bava or Argento. The bombastic score, by Johan Lenox, which trades off thunderous horns and the soft, elegiac singing of a child to a disquieting effect, would feel right at home in some long-forgotten Giallo; “Suspiria” meets “Lord of the Flies”. But Pollinger, to his credit, does not heed the siren song of genre and instead commits to the unease of the real. I would almost say it could be helpful to show this movie to young boys as a matter of education, but it would certainly have no lasting effect. Childhood is a gauntlet we must undertake alone, and all the helpful advice in the world will not make the journey less treacherous. That any of us survives the passage is a miracle until, much like poor Mr. Prufrock, “human voices wake us, and we drown”.
Dive into the depths.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Plague” is playing at The Broad Theater.