Independent Film Company has debuted the official trailer for The Plague, the debut feature from writer-director Charlie Polinger, ahead of its theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles on 24 December, with a wider rollout scheduled for 2 January.
Set at an all-boys water polo camp, the film follows a shy twelve-year-old who gets dragged into a nasty tradition at the camp, where the boys single out one kid they call “The Plague.” At first it seems like a childish joke, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s not as harmless as it looks. The cast includes Joel Edgerton, Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, and Kenny Rasmussen.
“From script to completion this film has always had a very strong vision. Charlie Polinger is a filmmaker with a great future ahead. I’m proud to have been part of his first film along with these incredible producers and companies,” Edgerton said in a statement to Variety.
Polinger, who also wrote the script, has described the film as “about the clumsy liminal space between childhood and adolescence, when the id grows too fast and too strong for the conscience to keep up. It’s a coming-of-age folk tale, in which human compassion and social acceptance are mutually exclusive.” He says the story came from his own childhood journals: “I first came up with The Plague when I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and came across my old journals from when I was 12. Rereading them, I was reminded of my summer at an all-boys sports camp… It was a cruel social game—one that enforced conformity by singling out the misfit. The unspoken lesson: those who didn’t conform were not simply different—they were threats, weak, deserving of punishment.”
Polinger also states having been influenced by films like Carrie, Raw, Black Swan, and Eighth Grade, saying he wanted to look at “the social terror of vulnerability, transformation, and the body” from the point of view of boys—a perspective that doesn’t often get explored in psychological horror.
Casting was a major focus for the film. The team wanted the young characters to feel authentic, so they searched widely for the right performers. Kayo Martin, spotted on Instagram, was cast as Jake, while Kenny Rasmussen and Everett Blunck rounded out the main trio. Each boy was selected for how convincingly they could show both the innocence and the cruelty of being twelve, capturing the awkward, intense energy of that age.
The film was also shot on 35mm film during heat waves, which Polinger says was “demanding,” but the work was made possible by a dedicated team including cinematographer Steven Breckon, costume designer Jocelyn Pierce, and editor Simon Njoo.
The trailer, released today, gives a first glimpse into Polinger’s world, where childhood rituals are anything but innocent, and the pressure to belong can have serious, lasting effects…
