Ben (Everett Blunck) is a mild-mannered young teen enrolled in a water polo summer camp run by coach “Daddy Wags” (Joel Edgerton). As Ben settles in, he quickly learns the pecking order established by the boys with Jake (Kayo Martin) at the top of the social hierarchy and Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a boy with alternative interests and a prescription to treat his severe eczema, well at the bottom. Wanting to fit in, Ben befriends Jake, but as Jake’s tormenting of Eli grows in intensity Ben finds himself stuck at a moral crossroads.

Charlie Polinger writes and directs The Plague, his first feature and a harrowing tale of adolescent cruelty that debuted at the 2025 edition of the Cannes International Film Festival. The 95-minute coming of age drama was picked up by IFC for distribution, running the title across the fall festival circuit where it continued to gain acclaim and recognition for its daring portrayals and young cast.

Interestingly enough, Polinger never reveals if these boys are particularly good at the sport or if they are simply there as something to do where idle minds lead to impish games. They have very little sports talk across their down time in the cafeteria or the bunk room, and this choice to keep the sport of it all in the background helps to highlight that they are making the conscious choice to bully Eli as it does not appear that their personal records and stats in the water have any influence on their behavior out of the pool. Further, there is a brief brushing up against the girl’s synchronized swimming team, and while the film culminates in a camp wide dance, there is never any true romantic maneuvering that inspired the boy’s actions against each other beyond the general nagging of each other for being caught watching the girls while ignoring that they themselves were also caught looking.

That brings us to Ben, and while Edgerton gives the film some name recognition, he occupies very little time on screen as The Plague is truly Ben’s crucible. Blunck, a busy young actor with an already eclectic collection of titles on his resume, has the difficult task of being the centerpiece of a wider ensemble made even more difficult by occupying such a passive role. He is our eyes into this world, coming in late to camp and having to find his way around from there. At one of the meals, he is startled that all of the boys quickly get up and move to another table when Eli joins them. When he asks what it was all about, he learns that Eli is “infected” with “the plague,” and that anyone that sits near him or makes contact with him will be infected, too. Thinking it all just part of an elaborate joke and looking to fit in with Jake and the other boys, Ben takes his tray to the other table with a hesitant laugh not fully realizing yet that Eli is not in on this game of “tag.”

For all of Ben’s modesty, Jake is the exact opposite; loud, boisterous, and always holding court with the other boys. Martin, then, in his first feature role, similarly has a difficult task ahead of him as he must play something of an antagonist while not pushing audiences so far away that we do not buy the friendship which is fostered between him and Ben. The young actor excels in the role with just enough swarm to irritate audiences, but plenty of suave so that we see the allure of getting in close with him as he is the ringleader of this polo team. Impressively, the script never has him commit anything too conniving or lying to the adults to get ahead; that last part made easier since Edgerton, the lone adult, as stated, has very little screen time in this film. Rather, Jake shapes the narrative pretty directly by his own antics in riling up the boys and then taking a quick step back to let it all play out.

Somewhere stuck in between it all is poor Eli. Rasmussen is asked to do a lot in front of Steven Breckon’s lens as he needs to play Eli to be content in his own world and ambivalent to the sneering of the other boys around him. Even with the protection of character, it is no easy thing to ask of a young actor, but Rasmussen rises to the challenge, aided of course by the work of his two main costars in Blunck and Martin while likewise raising their respective performances, too. Poligner’s script is also adeptly balanced in how it navigates Eli’s unique personality as well as his strained position in the social hierarchy and uses that to deeply influence how we, the audience, receive, interpret, and ultimately empathize with the events that make The Plague more than just a coming-of-age social thriller, but much more of a think piece and thought experiment while still maintaining some poppier genre elements.

It is refreshing that Polinger, armed with a provocative script, never tries to entrap the audience and force them into siding with Jake’s hazing. Jake is always viewed with a bit of contempt and while the nagging question of why someone has not stepped in sooner to curb this behavior never takes center stage, Jake’s character is coddled by that underlying notion of boys will be boys and general teenage angst that is at an exceptionally volatile moment when, through age, these boys are all peers but they are all at wildly different emotional and hormonal stages from each other. Breckon’s lens captures this in the physical sense – braces, gangly limbs, and it cannot be by accident that Jake is the smallest of both Ben and Eli in height and mass respectively. Notably, Breckon’s camera is not purposefully filming these boys through the lens of body horror, but rather he shoots them in a way that is almost meant to celebrate them while still allowing for the subconscious anxieties to come through in a very natural way. This makes Eli’s complete and total embrace of himself all the more fascinating and frustrating to watch because he is living in an idealized world all of his own; one that comes crashing down in a shocking conclusion that can only be curtly and cutely summarized as “Full Metal Speedo.” The two films – The Plague and Full Metal Jacket (1987), specifically the first half – share a lot of thematic relevance with each other which certainly draws conclusions about the cruelty of youth. While Polinger’s film does end a little abruptly as far as the plot is concerned – none of these three boys will have a pleasant “tomorrow” and it seems unfair that Eli must pay the price for Ben’s revelation – it can be forgiven in the moment because thematically he ends his thesis with a lionization of the importance of self-acceptance, love, and care.