Spontaneous

The students of Covington High School are exploding. Not into song, or into conversation. Nope, they are actually exploding like plasma filled balloons and spraying their classmates with showers of blood that don't damage anything but the clothes they're wearing. And no one knows why. Mara (Katherine Langford) is the recipient of one such splashing and before we know it the senior class of the school are popping like flies (geddit!!) In the midst of tragedy Mara falls for Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a classmate who's already experienced loss in his life and the two plan a way out of the mess they've found themselves in. 

Spontaneous is based on a book written in 2016 but its like it could have been written last week. It feels apocalyptic, its characters are filled with ennui driven by a pandemic no one knows how to stop and one that seems never ending, they've become jaded & cynical because everything feels pointless and at one point our leading lady calls Donald Trump a motherfucker. Emotions and words we've all felt at some stage or another in the past 6 months. It should be horrifying but somehow it manages to be......I feel odd saying this......but somehow it manages to be .... kinda fun. There's gallows humour a-gogo, the scenes where Mara decides to say FUCK IT and let lose are darkly hilarious, as we watch her do the things we all hope we could do. That prom/graduation speech, her inpromptu visit to the local supermarket for free libations, her raspy reaction to a confession. Langford sells it perfectly and she seems to be having a lot more fun here than she did in Netflix's 13 Reasons Why.

Then we get a lovely romance between her and Plummer's Dylan. The pair together are fierce likable, and the chemistry between them fizzles.Two oddballs drawn to each other, both tiptoe-ing around each other at first and then going all in when they realise everything might finish in the blink of an eye and its here you realise what the film is all about. Grabbing life by the balls and going for it. Being spontaneous instead of waiting to spontaneously combust. Teenagers these days are growing up surrounding by naysayers and doomsday prophecies, They can't see a future for themselves, least not a future that resembles what their parents had, what TV and film has promised them. The plague of explosions are metaphorical, standing in for all the social ills facing them, guns, suicide, drugs, the many many ways you can self destruct these days. No answers will be given here, you have to work them out for yourselves leading to a conclusion that just rings true.

It's not a perfect film though, few rarely are. The first half is great, funny and horrible, often both at once but it seems to lose its way at around the hour mark. The story meanders, starts to feel aimless and like it's protagonist it feels like it could go in any number of directions but thankfully gathers itself up to give us a decent ending. Langford's Mara keeps it afloat throughout though, whether she's laughing or despairing. In a clever piece of casting we get Piper Perabo playing her mother. 20 years ago she was the audience proxy as the lead in Coyote Ugly and now a generation later she's a audience proxy's mam in this. In 2000 things seemed carefree in that film's New York City, before 9/11 a year later when darkness of the 21st century rocked up, kicked the door in and decided to stay a while. Teen films then and teen films now are a world apart.

Spontaneous is streaming online now and it's worth your time. Gore and subtext. What more could you want?