The Plague (2025) Review

by Jack Hanley of Kinophilia and HanleyOnFilm.com

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 *****

Jack Hanley is a Boulder-based film scholar, podcaster, and critic. He is a co-conspirator with many Festivals- including Slamdance’s The Indies Awards, Chicago Underground, and the Boulder International Film Festival. He is one-half of Blindspotting: A Film Discovery Podcast. Find him at Kinophilia on Medium and at HanleyOnFilm.com