“Coming-of-age movies often have a nostalgic feel,” says director Charlie Polinger. “And I felt that it was actually a very horrific, intense, visceral time.”
Polinger drew on this feeling for his feature directorial debut, The Plague, which arrives in theaters Dec. 24. The film, which bowed at the Cannes Film Festival and is up for best feature at this year’s Independent Spirits Awards, takes place at a water polo summer camp for 12-year-old boys, where one camper has been ostracized for having “the plague,” a nasty-looking case of eczema. Another of the boys, Ben (Everett Blunck), struggles between his desire to help the outcast camper and his worries about incurring the wrath of the larger group, especially the ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin).
The director, a graduate of the AFI conservatory, spent two summers growing up gritting his teeth at an all-boys sleepaway sports camp. He says, “It took me through the second summer to get the confidence to tell my parents that maybe I wanted to mix it up.” He spent the following summers at a theater camp in Maine, mounting productions like West Side Story.
He came up with the idea for The Plague after moving back into his childhood home during the pandemic, where he found himself quarantined in his childhood bedroom with COVID. He says, “When the fever broke, my mom was like, ‘Now can you clean out the room?’ Which she had been asking me to do for years.”
As Polinger started sifting through clothes and others refuse of his past, he found journals, photos and yearbooks from his adolescence. “All these memories came flooding back kind of all at once, things I hadn’t thought about in over a decade. And I just started writing it all,” he says. He remembered jokes, name-calling and games, not unlike the one in his movie, that could turn casually cruel.
“It’s such an unhinged age,” says the director. “I don’t think this is specific to boys. When you’re becoming aware of your own consciousness, and you’re exiting childhood with hormones coming in, there’s this desire to push boundaries and wreak chaos.”
He started making calls to friends, gathering other people’s experiences of being a tween boy at summer camp and beyond. He began clocking the immense overlap (clothes, catchphrases, games, etc.) and the occasional outlier, like a memory of a camper who spent every night with a Betty Boop cardboard cut-out in his bunkbed.
And the time spent cleaning out his childhood bedroom proved worthwhile in other ways. Polinger’s clothes, from T-shirts to Adidas slides, are used as costumes in the movie, which is set in 2003. Ahead of filming in Romania, he asked his Millennial heads of department to raid their own childhood bedrooms for artifacts like CDs, walkmen and early generation Nintendo Game Boys. Other crewmembers filled suitcases with Costco-sized cases of Capri Sun juices, bags of Doritos, and other staples of the 12-year-old boy’s diet circa the early aughts. (Capri Suns proved difficult to source on the ground in Romania.)
The goal was to hint at a time period but not be consumed by it, a similar approach to films like Greta Gerwig’s early 2000s-set Lady Bird. He says, “We wanted to have the exact right level of period. It still felt kind of like this timeless, slightly surreal place.”
Initially, filmmakers didn’t plan for production to happen in Romania, but their search for the perfect pool brought them to southeastern Europe. They had an email thread going called “Best Pools in the World,” and landed on an indoor pool that would be vacant all summer because the usual tenants — the Romanian national water polo team — were busy competing in the summer Olympics.
For the most part, Polinger approached directing his cast of 12 and 13-year-olds the way he directs adults. (The Plague’s sole onscreen adult is a well-meaning coach played by Joel Edgerton.) He placed an extra emphasis on creating a clear boundary between what happens in scenes and everyone hanging out in the downtime outside of filming.
To carefully pull off one of the film’s more distressing sequences, when “plague”-afflicted camper Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) gets an erection in front of the entire camp, everyone, including the crew, took turns being the person getting laughed at, a suggestion of the intimacy coordinator.
“It gave Kenny, who played Eli, the confidence to be really vulnerable,” says Polinger. “It also gave the other boys confidence to be really mean in the scene, because they knew that they weren’t going to actually be hurting his feelings.”
This scene, like many in The Plague, could easily be played for laughs in a different movie. Polinger explains, “When you’re 12, everything can be a joke, or everything can be not a joke really quickly. We’re trying to capture that feeling in the film, too, where it is funny, but then it’s not, and it’s really stressful.”
It’s this seemingly ubiquitous feeling that has been connecting with audiences. The film became one of the big discoveries at Cannes, with the THR review reading, “In the age of renewed questions about and considerations of the manosphere, The Plague is a prescient title.”
Just like Polinger in his childhood bedroom, The Plague has watchers remembering their own childhoods, with equal parts delight and horror. “People come up to me of all ages and start telling me stories from when they were 12,” says the director. “And maybe overshare a little bit.”
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