Rating: R | Runtime: 98 minutes
Release Date: December 24th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Independent Film Company
Director(s): Charlie Polinger
Writer(s): Charlie Polinger

You don’t actually believe in that, do you?

I like what Charlie Polinger is trying to do with The Plague (inspired by his own journals from when he attended a sports summer camp). To portray the social anxiety inherent to that transition between middle school and high school wherein friends groups dissolve and a desire to be popular starts overtaking many kids’ hope to be themselves. Pick on the weirdo, earn cachet by initiating the taunts, and turn anyone who questions your power into a pariah too.

I do, however, wish he leaned further into the body horror of it all. Between the score and stylistic visual choices, he’s obviously going for a nightmarish filter despite an immovable ambition to maintain the authenticity of the story’s reality. I’d argue it’s better to let the metaphor live rather than allude to its existence. The message gets lost when you try to straddle that line by giving audiences both simultaneously. It seeks to merely use genre trappings, not be a genre film.

Everett Blunck as the sensitive protagonist who literally finds out you can’t be a “good Sith” and Kenny Rasmussen as the easy target of ridicule and abuse are both great, but my favorite performance of the whole is Kayo Martin as the ring-leading bully. Cruelty is easy. Apathetic indifference is not. His Jake is engaging in psychological warfare above just name-calling and incitement. That grinning ability to calmly converse with his victims is truly chilling stuff.

Conformity was the real plague all along.

---

Everett Blunck in THE PLAGUE; courtesy of Independent Film Company.