An experience as a 12-year-old inspired The Plague, Charlie Polinger’s psychological horror set at a boy’s water polo camp. Kitty Grady speaks to the director about depicting the terrors of adolescence, being influenced by The Shining, and 2000s nostalgia.
Like many millennials during the pandemic, director Charlie Polinger found himself back in his childhood bedroom, sick with Covid. As his fever lifted, he started leafing through old yearbooks, journals, and photos from summer camps he’d attended. “All these memories came flooding back of this actual experience I had when I was 12. There was this idea of the plague. And one kid had it,” says Polinger.
This discovery provided the genesis for The Plague, Polinger’s debut feature, a psychological horror set at a boy’s water polo camp. The protagonist, Ben, is an anxious boy who has just arrived on the west coast from Boston following the separation of his parents, and is keen to fit in with his classmates, who torment their coach (a hangdog Joel Edgerton)—and each other. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a boy with a peculiar imagination and a rash on his body, is an easy victim. He has been branded, as chief bully Jake (Kayo Martin) explains, with ‘the plague’. Touch Eli and you risk being infected. It is an imaginary game with very real social consequences, and Ben looks to Eli with fascinated horror. Marked out for his speech impediment (he pronounces Boston, ‘Boson’, gaining the nickname ‘Soppy’), we watch Ben struggle to stay afloat within the group’s increasingly demonic hierarchy.
Premiering in competition in Un Certain Regard in Cannes, The Plague received an 11-minute standing ovation. Musician and actor Charli xcx was among the audience members, and quickly took to Letterboxd to praise the film’s depiction of masculinity (“the transition from charming boyhood to total fucking chaos left me shook,” she typed.) “There are more [horror] movies about young girls, like Carrie [Brian de Palma, 1977] or Raw [Julia Ducournau, 2016],” says Polinger, four months later over Zoom from Hungary, where he is in pre-production for his next feature. “Films about boys tend to be nostalgic—biking around and talking on the radio—looking back at youth with rose-tinted glasses. I didn’t feel that there were movies about boys that had horror or intense anxiety.”
The Plague cleverly collapses the genre of horror with the horror intrinsic to adolescence. The script had origins in Sauna, Polinger’s 2018 short about a boy at a water polo camp who meets an old man after starting to grow chest hair.“It’s about the existential dread of puberty, that, even at age 12, you get the fear that death is coming,” says Polinger. In an opening scene of The Plague—Ben popping a pimple is imbued with a genuine sense of terror—the score, by Johan Lenox, a college friend of Polinger (a “classical composing prodigy,”) includes a chilling ‘ha ha ha’ motif that he created with his own voice.
Much like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), The Plague’s sense of claustrophobia (it was shot across several schools and an Olympic training pool in Romania) becomes a backdrop for an increasingly unstable mind. We watch Jake skateboard down the school’s corridors, a nod to Kubrick’s motif of Danny tricycling through The Overlook hotel. “That movie is a masterclass in how a space can evoke interiority. It gets brighter and more in your face, these rooms appear that you haven’t seen before. It makes you feel nauseous, like eating too much candy,” says Polinger, who describes disrupting the spatial logic of his own film—mismatching corridors and rooms— to create a sense of unease. “In films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Repulsion (1965), they would intentionally change the sets so you feel like you’re going crazy when watching the film,” says Polinger. “I wanted to turn this polo camp into a place that is unreliable, you’re inside the head of someone who is not seeing things objectively.”
To find his actors, Polinger describes watching thousands of audition tapes. He worked with casting director Rebecca Dealy, after seeing her work on horror favourite Hereditary (2018). “She didn’t pick your typical little girl in a horror film.” Kayo Martin, who excels in playing the ‘I’m just fucking with you’ Jake, was found on an Instagram talent scout page called New York Nico. “This kid would run around in bodegas in New York, pushing trash cans on people and running in the other direction—it felt quite 2000s in spirit.”
Poster for The Plague, directed by Charlie Polinger
“Films about boys tend to be nostalgic—biking around and talking on the radio— looking back at youth with rose-tinted glasses. I didn’t feel that there were movies about boys that had horror or intense anxiety.”
“Films about boys tend to be nostalgic—biking around and talking on the radio— looking back at youth with rose-tinted glasses. I didn’t feel that there were movies about boys that had horror or intense anxiety.”
Charlie Polinger
While the only certifiable star in the film, Joel Edgerton is confidently underused by Polinger, who foregrounds the performances of the boys. Despite attempts to inspire and control his classmates, the coach (nicknamed ‘Daddy Wags’) cuts a ghostly, haunting figure, once bullied himself. When Ben ends up escaping from the camp he gives him the “most depressing pep talk ever”. Did Polinger see parallels between coaching and directing? “I hope I’m a better coach than him,” he jokes, before describing the shoot as “magical.” “The group was like this living organism—one note would change the tenor of an entire sequence,” says Polinger. “Joel would come up to me and say he was floored by watching these kids. Everyone would react so spontaneously. It was sort of the purest form of acting.”
No matter your place in the pecking order, it’s impossible to watch The Plague and not have some Proustian memory of adolescence—its interminable quality, filled with cruelty, loneliness and a desperation to be accepted. While filming, Polinger describes his own “flashes of memory, like in Harry Potter or something. And that would give me a new idea, like this specific stuff from the early 2000s, like a specific Adidas flip flop, or a boom box playing a Ying Yang Twins song. It was exciting to revisit that and go back into that world.”
Charlie Polinger at the Hamilton Fish Pool in New York City, 2025. Portrait by Josh Wulfahrt.
Polinger was born in 1990 in Washington DC, Maryland. As well as summers at soccer, basketball camp, and taekwondo camp, he recalls trips into New York with his mother to eat cheesecake in Midtown and watch musicals like the Lion King and Cats. “I fell asleep, and one of the cats woke me up—it really freaked me out,” says Polinger. As a child he would also create James Bond fan fiction on his parents camcorder (he later graduated to Austin Powers).
Whilst studying at Yale, Polinger got into theatre, and started to direct shows off- Broadway in New York. A rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights inspired a pivot into film, and he enrolled at the AFI (American Film Institute). He now works closely alongside director Lucy McKendrick, his partner and producer, who is herself in production with her debut feature Fangs, which also stars Edgerton.
A small moment of dialogue in The Plague describes a boy called Charlie from the previous season, who gets the plague. “And now he’s in a mental hospital playing Jenga. I thought that would be funny,” says Polinger, who jokingly alludes to his own anxious temperament. “I remember seeing Uncut Gems and finding it really relaxing. The level of stress matched my own neuroses.”
Polinger is catholic in his taste for film— describing high/low double bills of Eurotrip and Casablanca as a teenager. His next feature, which he is currently shooting, is an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842), starring Mikey Madison and Léa Seydoux. “It’s closer to something like Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (1968),” says Polinger. “Although there is a plague in it.” With McKendrick he is also writing the Bratz movie (Kim Kardashian is rumoured to be playing the villain). “As much as I love movies about plagues, I also really love the early 2000s. So I think that will be pretty fun.”
The Plague is in select US cinemas from 24th December
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