There is maybe no time that feels more dog eat dog, in the ugliest and most routine ways, than early adolescence for boys. The Plague understands that cruelty can be ordinary long before it becomes monstrous, and Charlie Polinger turns a 12 year old water polo camp into a pressure cooker where fitting in carries a moral cost. It is a confident debut with a nasty little hook, even if it eventually leans so hard on its thesis that the theme starts to swallow the movie whole.
We watch the summer mostly through Ben, played with twitchy, lived in anxiety by Everett Blunck. He is new, eager to belong, and quickly learns that acceptance comes with a price. That price is Eli, played by Kenny Rasmussen, a bigger, awkward kid with a rash on his back and acne on his face that the other boys decide must be contagious. They nickname him “the plague” and turn avoidance into sport, refusing to stand near him and treating proximity like infection. Jake, played by Kayo Martin with a loudmouth ringleader energy that feels painfully familiar, keeps the mob moving. Ben hesitates, then participates anyway, not because he is evil, but because he is scared of becoming the next target.
Polinger shoots these dynamics with real bite. There are overt echoes of Full Metal Jacket in the ritualized humiliation and of Beau Travail in the way bodies, drills, and group hierarchy blur together, especially around the pool. The camp becomes its own closed ecosystem, and the water imagery does heavy lifting, both as a literal space where the boys compete and as a metaphor for how easy it is to drown socially at that age. There is even a quick burst of self harm imagery that lands like a jolt, a reminder that this is not kid material even when it is about kids.
Joel Edgerton shows up as the coach, direct and intimidating but mostly uninterested in anything outside the drills. He clearly senses what is happening, yet only clamps down when the hazing gets loud and violent enough to disrupt practice. It is a smart and grim reflection on adult complicity, the way authority figures can normalize cruelty simply by treating it as background noise.
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Where The Plague loses me a bit is in the back half, when the idea of bullying as infection becomes the only note. The film keeps sharpening the same point until it starts to feel like a run on sentence, and at 95 minutes that repetition wears thin. Polinger’s style is strong enough to keep it watchable, and the young cast commits, but I wanted a little more shading in the escalation, something that complicates the dynamic instead of only intensifying it.
Still, this is an interesting smaller picture with real craft, and it makes Polinger feel like a filmmaker to watch. If he brings this same visual confidence and willingness to get uncomfortable to his next project, including his planned The Masque of the Red Death with Mikey Madison, he could be onto something.
Score: 6/10
The Plague (2026)
- Cast: Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, Kenny Rasmussen, Joel Edgerton
- Director: Charlie Polinger
- Genre: Drama, Horror
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: January 2, 2026
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