Producers: Lizzie Shapiro, Lucy McKendrick, Steven Schneider, Roy Lee and Derek Dauchy   Director: Charlie Polinger   Screenplay: Charlie Polinger   Cast: Joel Edgerton, Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, Kenny Rasmussen, Lucas Adler, Caden Burris, Elliott Heffernan, Lennox Espy, Kolton Lee and Nicolas Raşovan Distributor: IFC The Independent Film Company

Grade: B

There have been many films about bullying, but few have gotten quite so far under the skin as this dark fantasy about the cruelty perpetrated by adolescent boys at a sports camp.  There’s a “Lord of the Flies” feeling to the plot, because though the boys aren’t without adult supervision, as represented in the coach the boys derisively refer to as Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton) it proves almost spectacularly clueless and ineffectual.  (If the story were set in 2025, one can imagine his charges dismissing him with a chant of “6-7.”)

But the year is 2003, and the place the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp for boys of twelve and thirteen.  Ben (Everett Blunck) is a newcomer, an awkward kid emotionally scarred by his mother’s sudden separation from her husband to be with her lover and his move to a new home. Joining an existing class, he’s the odd man out, desperate to fit into an established group whose unofficial leader is Jake (Kayo Martin), a sly curlyhead whose smile conceals a sinister ability to detect others’ weaknesses, which he then pounces upon.  He immediately seizes on Ben’s speech impediment—he pronounces “stop” as “sop”—to put him in his place near the bottom of the pecking order, coining his new nickname, “Soppy.”

But the very bottom is occupied by Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), an outcast ridiculed for his odd habits but especially for his skin rash, which Jake leads the other boys in his crew—Julian (Lennox Espy), Logan (Lucas Adler), Tic Tac (Elliott Heffernan), Matt (Caden Burris) and Corbin (Kolton Lee)—to call The Plague.  They avoid contact with him, even scooting away to another table in the cafeteria when he approaches.

Ben is more sensitive than the others, secretly befriending Eli though fearing the danger of contagion.  Inevitably his solicitude attracts the attention of Jake and the others, and leads to his being ostracized as well—and to a particularly nasty assault on him in the dormitory.  The coach tries to help, but his sympathetic reminiscences about the problems he faced as a youngster strike Ben as little more than irrelevant pabulum from an ancient time.  Eventually a confrontation between the boys occurs.

It happens during a practice in the pool.  It’s the place where Polinger and cinematographer Steven Breckon contrive some of their most haunting visuals, shooting the boys—and in a few instances a girls’ team—from below, creating mesmerizing images with a blue-green halo.  But the locker rooms, hallways and other interiors of the production design by Chad Keith and Jason Singleton are also central to fashioning an atmosphere of claustrophobia and dread, a mood reinforced by the unhurried editing of Henry Hayes and Simon Njoo as well as the somber, choral-inflected score by Johan Lenox.

Edgerton is the major name in the cast, and he’s fine; but he plays second fiddle to his young costars, who, in contrast to those in so many films about adolescents and teens, actually look their characters’ ages.  Blunck, who was hobbled by the artificiality and affected writing of Nicholas Colia’s “Griffin in Summer,” is much better here, capturing both Ben’s vulnerable and his principled sides.  But it’s Martin who’s truly revelatory, endowing Jake with quiet malevolence while convincing us that even his insolence toward adults might be tolerated because of his engagingly boyish manner.  As directed by Polinger the rest of the boys are admirably natural, though Heffernan sometimes has difficulty expressing Eli’s eccentricities persuasively. 

There’s much discussion today about toxic masculinity.  “The Plague” succeeds in conjuring up a vision of that phenomenon in its earliest stages, in terms of both the boys’ treatment of one another and their glib, silly talk about sex.  It makes for a frighteningly poetic glimpse into the adolescent mind.