Hazing thriller The Plague is a deranged witch hunt set against teen water polo

Courtesy IFC

My favorite cringe-comedy of 2025 was Griffin in Summer. It’s the tale of a young playwright who forces his schoolmates and friends to stage elaborate productions around increasingly adult subject matter. Between his effete cloying and unmatched drive—think Niles from Frasier starring in Rushmore—his homemade products featuring foul-mouthed alcoholics and women seeking revenge abortions keep getting staged, as an increasingly worried community fails to stop him from escalating to dangerous predicaments.

Ten minutes in, I was looking up Griffin (Everett Blunck) on IMDb to figure how when I could next catch the most deranged child actor of a generation. It turns out that Christmas Day, his next film would be opening, and it would be a stomach-churning thriller about bullying, set in a teen boy water polo summer camp.

You know. A Christmas movie. For the kids.

I’m thrilled to report that Everett Blunck’s follow-up is, while on the opposite end of the spectrum tonally from Griffin in Summer, a second star-making turn in a film that I loved… but am not sure I could ever watch again (complimentary).

Director/screenwriter Charlie Polinger’s The Plague digs into a certain kind of cruelty by first grounding it in a specific adolescent innocence. These boys on the cusp of adolescence are finding themselves amid a full-time school for water polo—forcing their bodies to be exposed at all times while they sink or swim in competitions of endurance and control. Their coach (Joel Edgerton) provides an A- level of inspiration with a D+ level of keeping these kids in line. “Boys will be boys” is mostly the law of the land here.

These kids are not inherently evil. In fact, the gang of athletes use full advantage of the 2003 setting to remind me how fucked up I was at that edge, and how impossibly annoying we all were. If you’re someone who thinks that “6-7” jokes are stupid, I would gesture graciously towards this period where kids were doing Lil Jon’s “HWATTT” and “HWO KAY-A” every thirty seconds, as a language all its own. Between that, bleached Eminem hair, and the one-upmanship of being gross little perverts… yes, this movie pegs it.

But every clique needs a target, and Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is the obvious choice here. Nicknamed “The Plague” by the other boys, this neurodivergent tween has both an outsider personality and a skin condition, which the bullies have weaponized into a rumor about deadly skin-to-skin transmission. When Ben (Everett Blunck) tries to show a modicum of friendship to the outcast, he finds himself sharing in the onerous shunning. Alpha bully Jake (Kayo Martin, who brings a ton of Philip Seymour Hoffman energy to the screen) refuses to relent, long after all involved know that this has gone too far.

Courtesy IFC

The Plague reveals itself, gradually and almost cruelly, as a film about bullying—not the overt, movie-shaped kind marked by cruelty at full volume, but the quieter, systemic variety that thrives on repetition, hierarchy, and plausible deniability. The titular “plague” is less a pathogen than a social condition: the way power circulates in closed environments, how humiliation becomes normalized, how spectatorship enables harm.

Between the talented cast, a brutal soundtrack by Johan Lenox, and a burning blanket of emotion burden draped across the entire runtime… this is for real sickos. Merry Christmas!

The Plague is in theaters starting on Christmas.