"Carrie's got the curse! Carrie's got the curse," sang out the teens stomping onstage in a locker room in the short-lived 1988 Broadway adaptation of Stephen King's ode to menstruation.
Don't be surprised then if "Ben's got the plague! Ben's got the plague," is being chanted likewise in the near future. If "that time of the month" with a dash of telekinetic powers can inspire a musical, why can't a lad with a ghastly rash do the same?
Writer/director Charlie Polinger's The Plague, with its current 100% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, is a raw, painful look at pre-adolescence based on the director's actual journals from when he was 12, a time he notes "when social anxiety is so visceral that every day feels like life-and-death." He labels his mesmerizing film "psychological horror."
With its trauma-inducing score (Johan Lenox), its eerily immersive cinematography (Steven Breckon), its perfect casting of both awkward and bullies (Rebecca Dealy), plus its riveting pacing (editors Henry Hayes and Simon Njoo), The Plague does for pre-teens what Jaws did for sharks and The Shining accomplished for recovering alcoholic authors with writer's block. You'll want to keep them at more than an arm's length.
Although shot in Bucharest, Romania, the film takes place somewhere stateside in the summer of 2003 at the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp, 2nd session.
Opening shot: a huge, uninhabited swimming pool. A screen of discomforting, gurgling blue. Suddenly, one boy jumps in from a distance. Then a multitude follows. Within seconds,s all we see are dozens of headless, flailing tweens kicking to and fro. Sound: disembodied blasts as if from a ship leaving port.
Cut to the boys' torso-less heads bobbing up and down above water as they clap hands in the pool, rather reminiscent of a Synchronized Swimming Olympic event as choreographed by Sweeney Todd? Fear not. It's a cheerful visual. Not a slaughter. The chaps are having fun. It's only the soundtrack that's at times rather worrying, plus your own memories, especially if you hid in bathroom stalls during your junior high years.
(Warning: After watching The Plague, be prepared for the rising up of flashbacks of some of your most traumatic pubescent trials by fire that you once thought were submerged forever. One of my own: After school was out, Howard B., who lived in my building, gleefully told me in the elevator that everyone in gym class that day noticed that my testicles were hairless. How they saw, I didn't ask. Worn-out undies? Anyway, I hadn't yet read Questions Children Ask by my mom, who borrowed the book from Susan Rosenhouse's mother across the street. Consequently, I didn't know I was supposed to be hirsute down there. By the way, the first two questions in that pragmatic guide were "Why don't I have one?" and "Why is Daddy's bigger than my own?" Thankfully, my father, who exposed me to many mental horrors throughout the years, avoided exposing himself, so I never even thought of asking that final one, and clearly I had no need to ask the first. But wait! They come in sizes? Clearly, a lack of sex education was just another reason in the Bronx in the early '60s to ridicule someone already blessed with a higher voice, uncoordinated limbs, and an inability to play punchball. Don't worry. Gyms and facial hair rid me of the taint.)
Back to critique: Class time. Coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who himself had a depressive youth, understands lads and is forgiving even when someone draws a penis with an unerasable red marker on the whiteboard he's utilizing for instruction. The probable artistic villain of this dastardly deed and the apparent leader of all non-scholastic on-campus delinquent doings is the ever-smirking Jake (Kayo Martin, nominee for several Breakthrough Performance awards at the moment). He's been around the whole summer and knows the ropes.
Not so for the new boy, the fragile Ben (Everett Blunck, who was so brilliant in last year's Griffin in Summer). He's walking through life as if feeling his way across a newly frozen lake. Every step can be a fatal misstep. But so far, the in-crowd is accepting him even if Jake immediately unearths Ben's flaw. The youth pronounces "stop" as "sop" and "Boston" as "Bosson." That's teasable, but not enough reason to be ostracized.
Happily, Ben is accepted at the "popular" lunch table, and he's even asked his opinion on such heady philosophical questions as would he rather have sex with a dog without anybody knowing or not have sex with a dog with everyone thinking he did.
Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) isn't so lucky. This quirky, shapeless youth, who's been around since the beginning of summer, has suddenly broken out with a body rash which Jake and pals have deemed a highly contagious form of leprosy. Don't touch Eli or sit where he has sat, or you'll have to run to the shower and soap up rigorously.
Ben feels both the absurdity and the injustice of this ostracization, but can he both befriend the boy with the dermal eruptions and still pal around with locker-room elite who lie about their sexual exploits when the lights go out? Of course not.
Edward Burne Jones, the pre-Raphelite painter, once noted: "I can only come near to what I wish, and am unhappy in consequence." Ben could wear that on a T-shirt.
In the end, what might at first sound like a Netflix 8-episode trek through the agonies of acne and the want to be accepted is instead a nigh-perfect film that is terrifying from beginning to end without the need of monsters because we, intentionally or not, are the monsters.
(Please note: the appropriately named Spooky Pictures is one of the production companies involved here.)