‘The Plague’ review: Joel Edgerton produces, stars in timely hazing drama

Dir/scr: Charlie Polinger. US/United Arab Emirates. 2025. 98mins

Writer/director Charlie Polinger’s jittery first feature takes place at an all-boys water polo camp, where adolescents inflict their cruel hazing rituals on their most sensitive teammates. The Plague gets its name from a made-up affliction troubling an ostracised oddball outcast, who earns the sympathy of a kindhearted newcomer played with great tenderness by Everett Blunck. The film has much to say about peer pressure and male rites of passage, although Polinger’s points can become repetitive and his insights not especially deep. Still, this uneven mixture of coming-of-age drama and psychological horror suggests a filmmaker with a flair for unsettling atmosphere.

Polinger does strong work with his young cast

Premiering in Un Certain Regard, The Plague should attract buyers thanks to the presence of Joel Edgerton, who serves as producer and also portrays the team’s shockingly ineffectual coach. Polinger taps into potent, albeit familiar themes about toxic masculinity, which gives the project a depressing timeliness.

In the summer of 2003, sweet-natured 12-year-old Ben (Blunck), who has just moved from Boston to an unspecified US city with his mum, joins a water polo camp, where he meets some of the veteran campers including cocky leader Jake (Kayo Martin). Ben learns that the team picks on Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a quiet, awkward kid they believe has ’The Plague’, a leprosy-like red rash that is supposedly contagious. Eli does, indeed, have a rash, but his teammates’ vindictive mockery (and their insistence that ‘The Plague’ is real) seems absurd to Ben, who decides to befriend this outcast — at his own peril.

Opening with an eerie, slow-motion underwater shot of the campers jumping into the pool, The Plague quickly raises alarms that something ominous awaits. Johan Lenox’s discombobulating score, emphasising distorted vocals and strange electronic sounds, only further accentuates the disorientation Ben feels around his brash, cliquish polo teammates. Turning adolescent spaces into surreal horror settings is commonplace, but Polinger puts us into Ben’s mindset as he tries to navigate his anxieties around being bullied.

The film works best at its most enigmatic, leaving the viewer uncertain about this so-called ‘Plague’. Early on, Jake tells Ben a cautionary tale about how Eli supposedly got it from a former camper who was eventually sent to a mental institution because of the disease — a story that sounds preposterous. But The Plague offers just enough plausible moments of unease that, while we never fully accept the team’s theories about this affliction, we understand how it becomes such a powerful fear — not to mention a deft metaphor for the dread most adolescents have about being shunned by their peers. The more time the compassionate Ben spends with proudly peculiar Eli, the more valid the ‘Plague’ becomes, reconnecting us with the feverish irrationality of that emotionally charged time of life.

Polinger does strong work with his young cast. Blunck impresses as a decent young man who finds himself losing his moral compass once he panics that Jake will turn his teammates against him. Rasmussen believably portrays an outsider whose quirkiness could be an act or, perhaps, a sign of more profound issues. Tellingly, Edgerton barely appears in The Plague, a distant paternal figure of no help to Ben, who turns to him for guidance and gets, arguably, the least-inspiring pep talk in cinema history.

Unfortunately, The Plague often overdoes its frenzied air of paranoia and fear, and its final sequences push for dramatic crescendos that aren’t entirely earned. And Polinger’s study of adolescent hormones run amok results in predictable conclusions, no matter the forceful bad vibes and cinematographer Steven Breckon’s moody 35mm images. For a film about an unsightly, irritating rash that spreads inexplicably, The Plague creates a powerful feeling of discomfort – even though it doesn’t always get under the skin.