The Plague (2025)
Genre: Drama / Thriller
Duration: 98 minuten
Country:
Australia / United Arab Emirates / United States / Romania
Directed by: Charlie Polinger
Stars: Everett Blunck, Kenny Rasmussen and Elliott Heffernan
IMDb score:
6,5 (4.684)
Releasedate: 16 May 2025
The Plague plot
A tense twelve-year-old boy attends a summer camp that is all about water polo. There he must find his place against the brutal social order. As an outsider, he is playfully given an illness, but as the game and reality merge, there seems to be something more to this joke.
Reviews & comments
Corcicus
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- 2819 messages
- 3954 votes
While The Plague is an American production, it has all the hallmarks of European arthouse, elevated horror. In any case, the film is perfectly suited to European film festivals. An eleven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, indeed.
Visually, this is certainly a stunning debut; the cinematography and sound design are excellent. The cast is small, but effective. The coach is also convincing as an adult who no longer knows how to control the youth. But what is this film actually about? The Plague is set at a water polo camp, a setting that screams for physical hierarchy, strength tests, and settling scores in the chlorinated water. But it's especially beside the pool that the film "takes a dive." A mix of extensive bullying, the desire for acceptance, and paranoia about a skin conditiontakes over the entire film. Naively, I gradually began hoping for a smashing finale where the bullies die in an explosion of violence.Instead, the exhausted protagonist inflicts nothing more than a scratch. No underwater fistfight, no direct confrontation, no moment where the leader of the bullies is taken down in front of his henchmen.
It's all very stylishly shot, with hypnotic underwater shots, but it lacks that raw, old-school lesson: if you're being bullied, learn to fight, project confidence, and if necessary, go berserk on the leader of the bullies to sow fear among your enemies and cement your reputation for a generation.As a horror film, this is a resounding failure, and the message is completely misguided. The focus was primarily on denouncing the myth of toxic masculinity.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Sepiroth
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- 121 messages
- 110 votes
More of a drama/thriller than a horror. Still, worth watching on a quiet evening when you have nothing better to do.
Translated from Dutch · View original
james_cameron
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- 7060 messages
- 9825 votes
An uneasy atmosphere pervades this drama about a twelve-year-old boy who faces bullying and worse at a water polo summer camp. The ominous music and the deliberately cold, stylized camerawork create an almost horror-like viewing experience. Well-acted and intelligently developed, but the plot and characters ultimately fail to fully develop, especially towards the end.
Translated from Dutch · View original
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