The Plague review – water polo camp turns into tween hellscape with impressive stylistic bite

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With Fincher-like intent, director Charlie Polinger scopes out concealed psychological depths in a debut that sees the laws of the jungle play out Set at a boy’s water polo training camp in the summer of 2003, Charlie Polinger’s debut feature plunges beneath the waterline to scope out concealed psychological depths. It may not be news that these kids operate in a brutal, animal-like hierarchy driven by braggadocio, bullying, hazing and gaslighting – but from the stunning initial submerged shot of a pool glittering like a starfield, Polinger brings impressive stylistic bite to this tween hellscape: the kind of trenchant intent you might associate with David Fincher. Latecomer Ben (Everett Blunck) is thrown in at the deep end when he arrives. Desperate to ingratiate himself with the cool crowd lorded over by the impish Jake (Kayo Martin), he aims to avoid the pariah status of house lummox Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who is supposedly afflicted with a (made-up) disease the brats dub “the pla...
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A Year in a Field review – calming, meditative film cycles through the Cornish seasons

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Christopher Morris filmed a field in southwest England for one year for a documentary that wants us to stop and think about the environment

The title says it all: beginning at the winter solstice in 2020, academic and film-maker Christopher Morris filmed a barley field in west Cornwall for one year. A field. That’s it. For 86 minutes this thoughtful, meditative documentary reveals the comings and goings: sunsets, sunrises, the midnight frolics of bunnies, the odd crisp packet blowing in. It’s unlikely to be storming a multiplex near you – though the opening scene does feature the close-up of a corpse. The unfortunate creature in question however is a field mouse that appears – limbs present and correct – to have expired from natural causes. The film’s paciest action scene is a three-minute-plus sequence of slugs slithering across lichen on a standing stone.

This eight-foot stone is more than 4,000 years old. “Carved by an alien civilisation – not from outer space, but outer time,” Morris says. “So long ago that who they were and what this means is lost to us with any certainty.” His voiceover has an elegant turn of phrase, finding poetry in the science of the moon slowly drifting away from Earth, or the complexity of the pale green lichen that makes its home on the ancient monolith.

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