When I was at sleepover summer camp in fourth-sixth grades, every cabin inevitably had a bunk schmuck who was remorselessly bullied. The schmuck was generally a kid who was fairly unpleasant; I never liked them, anyway, and wasn’t exactly motivated to be friends with them. I also didn’t participate in the bullying though, because I didn’t like hurting people and thought bullying was wrong. I tried to show sympathy once or twice; I remember offering my asthma inhaler to one kid who’d been bullied until he had a panic attack and couldn’t breathe (the inhaler didn’t help.) This made me a target to some extent as well—not often, because I mostly kept my head down and had a couple close friends who had my back.
I hadn’t thought about summer camp or the bunk schmuck in years, but watching Charlie Polinger’s The Plague brought it back with a queasy immediacy. The movie is set at a northeastern water polo camp for 12- and 13-year-olds; “the plague” refers to the bunk schmuck, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who has a brutal full-body rash and is autistic. The other campers, led by Jake (Kayo Martin) pretend that Eli’s contagious.
The one exception, after some hesitation, is Ben (Everett Blunck), a neurotic and self-doubting boy who after trying to fit in with the cool kids, can’t stand the cruelty and reaches out to Eli. That leads Jake to say he has the plague too—and things deteriorate from there, no thanks to the useless counselor Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton).
The Lord of the Flies set-up is familiar, though Polinger is more unsparing than Golding. The kids here aren’t in a life-and-death struggle which causes them to crack; they just torment each other because they like it and think it’s funny. Polinger’s careful not to provide any catharsis or relief. There’s no character who provides a consistent moral voice for “civilization,” nor do adults come in at the end to reestablish order.
There are moments when the tension relaxes—Ben chatting with another boy about whether they could convert the Sith to good; Ben running to a diner to call his mom and ask her to come pick him up; Ben showing competence at water polo. But the relief ultimately just makes everything worse—being competent intensifies the bullying rather than defusing it; Ben’s Sith friend betrays him, and so do the adults who cross his path. The movie cycles slowly through the locations of Ben’s abjection; the lunch room, where he’s shunned; the sauna, where he hides; his bunk, where the other boys subject him, while asleep, to escalating torture. Polinger’s eerie soundtrack and close-up on flaking flesh suggest horror films, but there’s no genre progression or escape into the knowledge that you’re watching fantasy. The humiliation’s real. There’s no escape.
Blunck gets Ben’s nervousness and his painfully wavering moral compass pitch perfect. But the real revelation here is Kayo Martin as the giddily, calculatedly sadistic Jake. His first scene, in which he identifies Ben’s speech impediment with precision and then lingers over it, makes Damien of The Omen look like kid’s stuff. Martin gives Jake a nauseatingly believable confidence in his own bullying; when Ben appeals to him for Mercy, he tells him, with deadpan sincerity, to just be himself and stop caring what anyone else thinks. That’s exactly what the ineffectual Daddy Wags tells Jake a few scenes later. It’s as if Jake can parody the words before they’re spoken because he knows exactly what Wags will say. Which he does, because adults always say the same nonsense rather than helping.
Jake mocks Daddy Wags to his face too, diminishing him in the eyes of the other kids. That’s a disheartening critique of Wags’ promise to Ben that things will get better. Wags, after all, is a 40-year-old adult, and he’s still getting bullied—and not by adult versions of Jake, but by Jake himself.
That’s realistic too. On social media, on our streets, in the White House, bullies like Jake continue to torment the Bens and Elis and to encourage the Bens and Elis to torture each other. In every bunk you go to, there’s always a schmuck. Somebody nearby always has the plague. You just hope it isn’t you—or perhaps, that you have the courage to stand with whoever it is. The Plague is a bleak reminder that most of us don’t.