The three young performers stand out in their unfiltered rawness: Blunck clammily eager to please and increasingly disturbed; Martin intimidating despite his tiny stature; Rasmussen stretching a cartoon geek role into genuinely unsettling outsiderdom.

It’s a very clever screenplay with unsettling shafts of black humour and perfect pacing.

Rather than deliver any sense of tension and release or thematic heft, The Plague remains a sometimes beautifully realized but ultimately hollow and frustrating hour and a half spent with selfish tween boys.

Polinger directs with real nerve, and stylistic precision, turning swimming pools and hallways into claustrophobic zones. Shot on 35 mm, it looks beautiful in a cold, suffocating way. It’s an impressively confident, disturbing first feature that lingers.