The Plague Review: A Boys' Camp Becomes a Pressure Cooker

Is The Plague good?

Yes — a perfect Critic Score of 100 makes The Plague one of the most acclaimed debuts of 2025, even though its Audience Score sits at a much cooler 60. That split is the story of this film: it is precise, disciplined, and formally confident in a way that critics responded to almost unanimously, while general viewers have a rockier time with just how uncomfortable it wants to be. A Metascore of 79 lands in between, suggesting the acclaim is real but not quite universal in its intensity.

What is The Plague about?

Set at an all-boys summer water polo camp in 2003, the film follows a socially anxious twelve-year-old named Ben as he tries to survive a brutal, unspoken pecking order among his campmates. Writer-director Charlie Polinger builds the camp into its own closed ecosystem, where status is earned and lost by the smallest gestures and cruelty spreads the way rumor does. Joel Edgerton anchors the adult presence at the camp’s edges, while the young cast carries the film’s central drama of humiliation, alliance, and self-preservation.

Should you watch The Plague?

Watch it if you want serious, unflinching coming-of-age drama and can tolerate real discomfort — this is not an easy hang. The wide gap between its Critic Score and Audience Score is a useful warning label rather than a contradiction: the craft is exceptional, but the subject matter — bodily shame, social cruelty among children, an atmosphere that never lets up — is deliberately hard to sit with. Letterboxd’s 3.5 and IMDb’s 6.5 both point to a film that earns respect more easily than affection.

How does The Plague compare to Lord of the Flies?

The clearest comparison point is Lord of the Flies — another story about boys left to police themselves and the ugly hierarchy that fills the vacuum where adult authority should be. Where Golding’s shipwrecked boys build savagery out of total isolation, Polinger’s camp is a supposedly controlled, supervised environment, which makes its cruelty feel more insidious rather than less. Both works use children as a lens for how quickly social order curdles into domination, but The Plague trades island survival for chlorine, whistles, and the particular claustrophobia of a summer that will not end.