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‘The Plague’ Review: Boys Will Bully Boys in a Stylish if Schematic Summer-Camp Psychodrama
Team watersports take a backseat to adolescent mind-games in Charlie Polinger's promisingly atmospheric, body-horror-tinged debut.
The idea of adolescence as a horror story is not new, but it’s given a splashy workout in Charlie Polinger ‘s queasily stylish debut feature, in which the swimming pools, lockers rooms and bunk-bed dormitories of a boys’ water polo camp are a puberty petrie dish livid with sinister bacteria. Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, “ The Plague ” has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in. Sometimes, while Johan Lenox’s excellent, ’70s horror-inflected, nightmare-choir score reaches a bombastic crescendo, the girls of the synchronized swimming class who share the pool and fire the boys’ crude erotic imaginings, are shown inverted, so they appear to be dancing floatily across the water’s underside surface.
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