SLIFF 2025 Review: “The Plague” – Charlie Pollinger’s Ferocious Look at Boyhood, Bullying, and the Birth of Monsters

Everett Blunck leads The Plague, a dark coming-of-age story about cruelty, hierarchy, and the cost of belonging.

There’s a passage I once read about young men — how they’re raised to love one another as brothers, and almost immediately, taught to compete. For land, for status, for women, for validation. That contradiction — that cycle of love turning into rivalry — runs deep in Charlie Pollinger’s extraordinary debut The Plague, one of the most quietly devastating films to play SLIFF 2025.

Not all monsters start out as monsters. And Pollinger’s film forces us to confront that truth head-on.

Set at a prestigious water polo camp, The Plague follows Ben (Everett Blunck), a shy, observant teen desperate to fit in among a clique of wealthy, self-assured boys led by Jake (Kayo Martin). Surrounded by teammates like Tic Tac (Elliot Heffernan), Matt (Caden Burris), Julian (Lennox Espy), Logan (Lucas Adler), and Corbin (Kolton Lee), Ben is quickly introduced to the camp’s dark social order — where power, cruelty, and control are currency.

When one of the quieter boys, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), becomes the target of their ritual humiliation — an act the group calls “the plague” — the bullying takes on an almost mythic dimension. What begins as verbal taunting spirals into psychological torment, and then something disturbingly physical, as Eli’s body begins to manifest the effects of stress and shame in ways that border on the supernatural.

Pollinger isn’t interested in jump scares or gore. This is a horror of social design — the horror of hierarchy. He and cinematographer Steve Brecken (A Place to Stay, Where the Water Runs) shoot the camp like a spiritual battleground: chlorine-blue pools gleaming with tension, the golden sunlight cutting through the sweat and fear on these kids’ faces.

The performances across the board are magnetic. Blunck’s Ben carries the ache of wanting to belong, while Martin’s Jake commands the screen with terrifying charisma. You can feel how these kids look up to him — and fear him — in equal measure. Their camaraderie feels so authentic that when things start to unravel, it’s almost unbearable to watch.

There’s a touch of Full Metal Jacket in how The Plague dissects toxic mentorship. But where Kubrick explored the militarization of masculinity, Pollinger explores its incubation — how boyhood innocence mutates under pressure. It’s The Sandlot stripped of nostalgia and Stand By Me haunted by the consequences of cruelty.

The supporting cast adds texture and gravity. Joe Egerton as the camp’s head coach brings a weary authority, trying and failing to contain what’s festering beneath the surface. And Pollinger smartly keeps adults at a distance; the story belongs to the kids — to their quiet cruelty, their broken empathy, their desperate need to feel powerful in a world that constantly measures their worth.

At its heart, The Plague is a study of trauma as contagion — how pain, when left unchecked, spreads. It’s darkly funny, deeply intelligent, and strangely tender in how it sees its young characters not as villains, but as victims of their own upbringing.

4 out of 5

Morbidly charming, quietly devastating, and one of the smartest psychological horrors of the year. The Plague cements Charlie Pollinger as a filmmaker to watch.