The Filmic 5: Pants To Your Funeral Edition
Your Weekly Film Superlatives By Critic and Film Scholar Jack Hanley
I. Film I Cannot Stop Thinking About This Week
THE PLAGUE
Charlie Polinger’s eerie and stylistic chlorine-soaked descent into pre-adolescent purgatory achieves what Golding could only theorize- that the savagery perhaps isn’t learned, but INNATE- a toxic and contagious masculinity plague that festers in the locker room long before it metastasizes in boardrooms and ballot boxes.
Clearly borrowing from the “horror of adolescence” aesthetic of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (with thematic nods to the masculine ideal and homoerotic subtext from both LORD OF THE FLIES and BEAU TRAVAIL), Polinger orchestrates an anxiety-inducing narrative propulsion underscored by an eerie and uncanny sound design that burrows under your skin like a contagion.
The camera work is claustrophobic and predatory, silently prowling through locker rooms and pool decks with a voyeuristic menace that transforms institutional architecture into a panopticon of dread, where every tilted angle and submerged shot operates less as aesthetic flourish and more as audience complicity to the violence unfolding.
Let me be clear- the three central performances here are STUNNING…Kenny Rasmussen delivers a deer-like vulnerability so devastating you’ll want to reach through the screen and rescue him from this water polo Inferno, and I am STILL waking up afraid of Kayo Martin’s smirk. The ensemble works with surgical precision to reveal that the real contagion was complicity all along.
The conspicuous absence of adults amplifies the existential terror that mirrors our own current geopolitical anxieties- that without the guardrails of institutional order or justice, we are left to construct our own savage codes. Polinger’s ambiguous treatment of the aforementioned “plague” itself operates as Rorschach for all manner of “otherness”- be it class, disability, queerness, or even the AIDS crisis of the 80s- a metaphor that refuses easy answers and demands we reckon with how fear itself becomes the most infectious plague of all.
This debut is ESSENTIAL VIEWING for ANYONE who survived childhood- or didn’t- and a masterclass in how cruelty masquerades as ritual and how the desperate need to belong has the potential to drown you faster than any swimming pool.
*** 1/2 out of *****
P.S.- Others are noticing too. Congrats, kid.
II. Podcast I Am Gushing Over This Week
Switched On Pop is one of my most beloved podcasts and should be one of yours too (is there anything better than a high-level academic deconstruction of a Taylor Swift bridge?). This episode asks the question cinephiles AND music obsessives should be asking right now as we approach awards season: can SINNERS do for the Delta blues what O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? did for bluegrass?
As the kind of film dork that went down a rabbit hole of Scott Joplin rags as a kid solely because of THE STING soundtrack, I am ALL IN on this discussion. Reanna, Nate, and Vulture's Fran Hoepfner dig into the long, fascinating history of those rare film soundtracks that actually shifted the musical culture- and whether Ryan Coogler's love letter to Black music has the cultural muscle to bring the blues roaring back. Check it out by clicking here while I put on my DRIVE soundtrack on vinyl...
III. Historic Moment I Am Rooting For This Week
Speaking of SINNERS...ever since that vampire "flew" into that opening scene, I've been TRANSFIXED by the brilliant cinematography in SINNERS. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (the first woman of color ever nominated in the cinematography category and only the fourth woman ever) has a shot to MAKE HISTORY and correct an egregious industry shortcoming.
IV. Moment That Moved Me This Week
If you are reading this you already know MY feelings on Brazil's THE SECRET AGENT (unequivocally the Best Film of 2025)- and just when THIS film programmer thought he couldn't possibly adore director Kleber Mendonça Filho ANY more, he goes and does this at the Independent Spirit Awards this week.
“I believe more and more that programming films in the cinema is a political act…Cinema is a manifestation of memory and memory is also a political act.” - Kleber Mendonça Filho
THANK YOU, Kleber on behalf of ALL film programmers EVERYWHERE who spend their days in the fight. Every film they help get on a big screen is, in itself, a quiet act of resistance- and a deliberate choice about whose stories and memories we help our fellow creatives to keep alive.
V. Your Weekly Moment of Zen:
Jack Hanley is a film scholar, podcaster, and critic based in Boulder, CO. He is a programmer with the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance's Indies Awards, and the Boulder International Film Festival. He is one-half of Blindspotting: A Film Discovery Podcast and the founder of the Reel Horrors Short Film Festival. Find him at Kinophilia on Medium and at HanleyOnFilm.com