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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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 7 – Saint Omer

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Alice Diop’s award-winning courtroom drama doubles as an unsentimental study in empathy with one of the year’s most mesmerising performances

At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.

The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.

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