The Plague Review: Adolescence Has Never Felt This Endless

Teen angst plus water polo should be a pressure cooker. In The Plague, it mostly turns into a slow simmer that never boils. There is a strong concept here — boyhood bravado, fear, and cruelty trapped at a summer sports camp — but the movie keeps hitting the same note for 95 minutes until you are begging for a key change.

What it is

First-time feature director Charlie Polinger sets the story in the summer of 2003 and centers it on Ben (Everett Blunck), the new kid just trying not to drown — socially and literally — at a local water polo camp. The team’s orbit is controlled by Jake (Kayo Martin), the kind of magnetic tyrant who decides an outsider named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) has a skin condition he calls 'the plague.' The rules of this playground mythology are caveman simple: touch him and you are infected. Ben shows Eli a little basic human decency, and the crosshairs swing to him.

Why it stalls

The big issue is the protagonist. Blunck is convincing as an anxious pre-teen trying to disappear, but the script gives him almost no agency. For most of the movie, Ben is a receptacle for other people’s worst impulses — bullied, sidelined, spooked — until he finally makes a choice far too late to matter. That passivity kneecaps the momentum.

On the flip side, the pack of tormentors is all edge, no shading. Martin nails Jake’s dead-eyed dominance, and the rest of the boys — including Caden Burris and Lennox Espy — play convincingly mean. But the cruelty is so constant and so big that it stops being scary and starts being numbing. After an hour of locker-room hazing and poolside pile-ons, the shock value has long since worn off.

The film also flirts with body horror: once Ben is ostracized, he starts spotting changes on his own skin and wonders if the 'plague' might actually be a thing. It is clearly meant as a metaphor for puberty and social contagion — the old 'cooties' panic turned dead serious — but the imagery and ideas are blunt. We have seen this exact metaphor handled with more finesse elsewhere, and here the horror never fully meshes with the coming-of-age drama. Both halves end up undercooked.

Meanwhile, the pacing is stuck in a loop. At 95 minutes, it somehow feels longer because the movie keeps replaying the same beat: bullying in the pool, bullying in the locker room, mirror-checking for symptoms, repeat. The stakes do not escalate so much as circle the drain.

Who pops (and who gets wasted)

• Everett Blunck as Ben: strong, inward performance that the script strands in neutral.
• Kayo Martin as Jake: convincingly vicious, the ringleader who feeds off fear.
• Kenny Rasmussen as Eli: the standout. He plays the designated target with unsettling restraint and realism — easily the most affecting work in the film.
• Joel Edgerton as Daddy Wags, the camp leader: all quiet watchfulness and physical presence, but the character is underwritten. Edgerton also produced, and the casting reads like a packaging move that helps the project more than the story, because the script mostly has him glower from the sidelines.

The finish

When the ending finally lurches into view, it goes for a shock. It does not feel earned. After so much repetition, the big swing lands hollow — like a last-minute attempt to forge meaning out of a movie that has been circling its thesis without sharpening it.

The bottom line

The Plague looks good, the young cast shows up, and the setting is a perfect petri dish for early-stage toxic masculinity. But the movie mistakes repetition for depth, saddles its lead with almost no decisions, and lets the 'cooties' metaphor smother any nuance. It captures the misery of adolescence; it forgets to make that misery compelling.

The Plague opens in theaters on December 24.