The Plague: Swim-Camp Psychological Horror is Like Lord of the Water Bugs

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-
The Plague is what remains if you strip most of the actual horror out of a horror movie, but keep the fear. The tension gets so thick you could cut it with a knife. Then it goes beyond that; you’d need something stronger, and sharper.
The setting is the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp, second session, summer of 2003.

That year jibes with the age of writer/director Charlie Polinger a millennial who mined his childhood journals for the movie’s material. But it also provides a precise technological moment — post-Internet, pre-iPhone. The dozen or so tween boys in the camp are modern kids, minus social media and constant connectivity.

Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is the outcast in The Plague.

They have no way to confirm or deny urban myths or weird rumours, like the talk that one of their cohort has “the plague,” which has riddled his body with a rash and turned his brain to mush. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is probably just socially awkward and afflicted with eczema, but that’s enough to make him the group’s outcast.
Ben (Everett Blunck), who has just joined, is well aware of the camp’s pecking order. At the top is Jake (Kayo Martin), short and Aryan pale and with a steady gaze primed to win every staring contest.

Ben has a few barely-there oddities that might single him out for bullying — vegetarianism, a lisp when anxious — but he manages to fit into the group’s broad middle, mostly because Eli is already firmly at the bottom.  However, it will take only one slight slip, or a word from Jake, to send him tumbling.
The boys are a putrid bunch, all hormones and misinformation. Much of their dialogue consists of discussion of girls — whose occasional appearance at the pool sends the lads into a testosterone tizzy — and “would you rather”s that set up two equally abhorrent options of a sexual nature.

It’s all very Lord of the Flies, and while there is actual adult supervision in the form of camp counsellor Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton, who also has a producing credit), there’s more than enough time and space for the boys to get into mischief — and worse.
There is some actual body horror in the film, but for the most part the terror exists entirely at the psychological level. The score does a lot of the heavy lifting on this front — breathy noises, sudden shifts in volume, silence when there should be sound, and vice versa.

Polinger also finds fascinating and disconcerting ways to shoot the pool scenes, often filming from underwater so that we see only headless, flailing bodies, or flipping the camera 180 degrees so that female swimmers seem to be suspended above the water’s surface tension, rather than below it. Even more effective is his way of using splashing water to hide detail — are those two boys engaged in play, simple roughhousing, or something more existential?

The result is a frightening flip side to the traditional coming-of-age genre, the one where boys find age and wisdom in roughly equal measure. There seems little hope of that for the camp class of 2003 in this eerie, watery tale. The pool they inhabit is all deep end, without even a convenient ladder for escape.
The Plague. Directed by Charlie Polinger. Starring Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, and Joel Edgerton. Opens Jan. 2 in cinemas.