Rating: R | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: October 2nd, 2020 (USA)
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director(s): Brian Duffield
Writer(s): Brian Duffield / Aaron Starmer (novel)

I’m just so glad I didn’t explode all over you.

Priorities have a tendency of changing when tragedy strikes. You start to wonder if you’ve been focusing on all the wrong things, realizing that life is too short to be afraid of following your impulses and desires. And if this is the case with “regular” tragedies, what must be going through the minds of teenagers exposed to witnessing the gruesome death of a classmate? A death so gruesome that you must go home and wash them out of your hair? You don’t come back from something like that—not fully. Just ask any survivor of the myriad school shootings our country still refuses to do anything about.

There’s a joke in Brian Duffield’s Spontaneous (adapted from the novel by Aaron Starmer) where Mara (Katherine Langford) complains that the spontaneous combustion of her classmate ruined her Halloween costume idea. You can’t go full Carrie White without dousing your prom dress in blood, but you also can’t douse your prom dress in blood when everyone in that classroom was covered in Katelyn just a few days prior. In that same vein, you can’t really make light of school shootings via comedy unless you don’t actually make it about school shootings.

Therein lies the combustion. It’s still violent. It’s still psychologically destructive. It’s still mostly random insofar as the victims not having done anything to deserve their fate. But it’s also unrealistic—at least in this quantity since people do spontaneously combust, just not this many within such a focused grouping. (We used to be able to say the same thing about school shootings.) So, since the scenario is rendered absurd, the characters can be too. Especially with today’s generation of teenagers born in a world that demands they get the joke. Because if laughter and love aren’t there to distract you, what’s left but the fear of being next?

It makes the first hour of Spontaneous must-see storytelling. Between the writing, acting, and cinematography (it always seems Mara is looking away just when it happens), we become fully engrossed in the high concept chaos of a senior class being quarantined as a result of no one knowing what’s happening let alone being able to stop it. Add romance courtesy of Dylan (Charlie Plummer) admitting his crush after realizing there’s no better time than now and you almost forget about the nightmare unfolding around them.

That’s how good Langford and Plummer are. Their snarky, sarcastic rapport makes light of everything so that they can smile through the horror. Stuck in hospital beds behind plastic walls with tubes coming out of your arms? Reach out and reenact a scene from ET to embrace the fact that you’re still alive despite it all. This blossoming romance becomes so sweet and funny that you also forget the PTSD that’s obviously affecting them to ignite drug and alcohol usage. At least until an unforgettable sequence akin to a war film jolts you back awake to the awful truth.

This means the last forty minutes will prove a much more somber affair as the inevitable reckoning occurs. You can only pretend you’re okay for so long because you can’t outrun the collective bad luck from taking someone away that you can’t just shrug off. Not that Mara and company are shrugging off Katelyn, Perry, and those that follow. It’s simply easier to accept the loss of faces you’re familiar with than it is those that you cannot fathom living without. That’s when the terror and anguish of these kids’ parents finally trickles down to the teens.

And while Mara might reject the idea that this story has a message about not giving up and living life to the fullest since no one should have to die to make us remember those things, it does exist. It’s kind of the point. Toeing the line of making that clear without going overboard either way isn’t an easy task, but I think Duffield succeeds even if the second half’s tone hits a bit too hard. But you need it to for everything that happens in the first half to mean something. Because, like I said in the beginning, this isn’t just a comedy about exploding teenagers.

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Katherine Langford and Charlie Plummer in SPONTANEOUS.