To stand out as a teenag­er is to make your­self a tar­get. The pack men­tal­i­ty that dom­i­nates most group set­tings for chil­dren ren­ders con­for­mi­ty a sur­vival imper­a­tive; Ben (Everett Blunck) under­stands this as a recent Boston trans­plant attend­ing the Tom Lern­er Water Polo Acad­e­my for the first time. He instant­ly notices that the ram­bunc­tious Jake (Kayo Mar­tin) is the ring­leader in their small all-male cohort, and the qui­et Eli (Ken­ny Ras­mussen) is the des­ig­nat­ed punch­ing bag. Owing to a skin con­di­tion, Jake and his cronies have start­ed a rumour that Eli has a con­ta­gious plague and con­tin­u­al­ly ostracise him, yet Eli, at least on the sur­face, appears strange­ly unboth­ered by their bul­ly­ing. Is his appar­ent placid­i­ty a symp­tom of his ill­ness? Jake and co cer­tain­ly believe so, while their well-mean­ing coach (a mas­ter­ful per­for­mance of inef­fec­tu­al­ness by Joel Edger­ton) remains rel­a­tive­ly igno­rant to the bar­bar­ic inter­per­son­al dynam­ics of his young wards.

Char­lie Polinger’s fea­ture debut deft­ly nav­i­gates the excru­ci­at­ing ten­sions of pre­teen­dom, but The Plague also cap­tures some­thing less overt­ly explored in cin­e­ma: the dif­fi­cul­ty of nav­i­gat­ing the world as a neu­ro­di­ver­gent indi­vid­ual. Eli’s exclu­sion from the group due to his per­ceived dif­fer­ence is the more obvi­ous part of this nar­ra­tive, but Jake’s frus­tra­tion at (and per­haps envy of) Eli’s refusal to con­form is key to the story’s fresh­ness. This illu­mi­nates a rarely dis­cussed part of the neu­ro­di­ver­gent expe­ri­ence, reveal­ing the com­plex inter­sec­tion of low­er and high­er sup­port needs, yet this speci­fici­ty is not exclu­so­ry; any­one who has expe­ri­enced or indeed observed the social peck­ing order of child­hood will like­ly recog­nise some ele­ment of The Plague, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the stel­lar per­for­mances Polinger has cap­tured from his young cast.

Tak­ing a few cues from Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade with a shade of Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Made­line in its fran­tic, breathy sound design, a palette dom­i­nat­ed by greens, blues, browns and greys cre­ates a claus­tro­pho­bic atmos­phere in which a pubes­cent blow-up nev­er feels very far away. It’s an impres­sive addi­tion to the com­ing-of-age canon, a mod­ern take on ​‘Lord of the Flies’ that doesn’t pull its punch­es. While the lack of adult over­sight for these fer­al pre-teens may raise an eye­brow, Polinger posi­tions the audi­ence square­ly at eye lev­el, and as a young­ster it real­ly can feel like you’re total­ly alone even sur­round­ed by sup­pos­ed­ly respon­si­ble adults. Yet Polinger also resists the temp­ta­tion to offer trite mes­sages of sup­port or overt self-accep­tance; the film’s con­clu­sion stings like the chlo­ri­nat­ed pool water the group spend hours splash­ing around in.

It’s an aus­pi­cious debut for Polinger, tech­ni­cal­ly ambi­tious and fierce­ly obser­vant of ado­les­cent anx­i­eties. Sink or swim, the scars of child­hood last much longer than any sum­mer school.

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