“What are we gonna do now… in this plastic world.” “I think this is our life now.”
I know it seems like we see the pandemic everywhere. And that we’re that much eager to find comparisons and allusions in popular culture as a way of getting through it. I’ve done my fair share. And it’s true that some media that has come out during this time reads a particular way or feels especially relevant in light of the context it’s coming out in. That said, there is no movie that is more eerily on the mark than Brian Duffields’ black comedy directing debut Spontaneous -which often feels impossibly like a deliberate commentary on the pandemic from before it began.
It also takes a very silly premise, an outbreak of spontaneous combustion in a high school senior class, and considers it both with morbid humour and a melancholy sincerity -because the movie is so obviously not about spontaneous combustion. Katherine Langford plays Mara, a brash and cynical stoner with a very irony-saturated attitude, who begins seeing Charlie Plummer’s clever and charismatic (though understated) Dillon, after he openly admits to a crush on her in the aftermath of their first classmate’s death. Previously shy about it, his new-found confidence is owing to the situation of uncertainty that any moment could be their last. And this is a big theme throughout the movie as their romance develops. There’s no knowing if one of them will be next so they try to make each moment count (hence the double meaning of the title) as they psychologically grapple with what’s happening to their classmates.
I have little doubt that the allegory the filmmakers were going for was probably the ongoing school shootings crisis in the U.S., where now children are growing up with that fear of being gunned down any day as a normalized aspect of the public education system. It’s certainly tangible in the scenes of panic after someone explodes or in the funerals the class attends, or in the school photo device used after someone dies (that is honestly pretty similar in function to the ‘confessional’ sequences of The Broken Hearts Gallery). But with the condition being treated in-film as a virus and even the word “pandemic” being dropped a few times, it’s uncanny how closely this movie speaks to our culture right now.
And not even the scenes of kids in quarantine, the isolation that they feel, or the mourning of those lost to this dramatic disease, but the attempts at adaptation, the mental, existential toll it takes on teenagers losing good friends, and especially the larger public reaction. Spontaneous seemed to predict to some degree the uselessness of the American response to COVID, where politicians attempt to comfort with empty platitudes and no concrete plans (though at least nobody tries to downplay the scourge in this film). There’s even an effort to get the students back to class before anything substantive has been found on the outbreak, and of course in the meantime the students find ways of coping through humour and gradual adjustment to a new normal. Again, you can see how all this lines up to the intended metaphor, but it’s impossible not to notice the reflection of 2020, and the movie is perhaps richer for being more relevant than it meant to be.
Most cuttingly though is the anxiety and uncertainty we see expressed through Mara’s perception of it all -she was sat behind the first victim in class. And Duffield presents her stylishly through a sardonic voiceover narration and glimpses into her mind, memory, and speculations. Even Dillons’ expositions are sometimes filtered through this lens of meta-reference and subjectivity. It’s a quirky way of incorporating a standard narration device for Y/A adaptations and threads the films’ tonal divergences succinctly, allowing for the film to be both genuinely bleak and bleakly funny. As it happens, that lines up with Mara’s personality and the points where she connects with Dillon. Langford and Plummer are very good, and have a wonderfully charming relationship -at times almost too perfect. It’s very reminiscent of the relationship at the heart of Brett Haley’s All the Bright Places earlier this year and runs into a few of the same thematic and narrative points, but plays them with much more competence. There’s a point in the film where the personal psychological trauma gets severe enough that you forget it was a comedy. It begins addressing loss and depression and ennui with an unmistakable honesty that hits very close to home right now. And it wasn’t all jokes before -in fact there’s one harrowing scene in a car at about the midpoint- but Duffield understands the need to highlight this particular kind of emotional turmoil and do his best to offer some kind of relief for it.
Of course he can’t really. Everyone knows that who’s lost loved ones to the pandemic or a school shooting or similar mass tragedy. But he gives us something to think about regardless in how we process such things -especially if we haven’t the firsthand experience. The spontaneous combustion does come to an end, but it leaves the survivors in just as uncertain a place as when it was raging. There’s a great epilogue, underlined by more snarkiness, which speaks with frustration to the current state of the U.S.; but also forms a thesis of sorts on how to find meaning in life after great loss, less All the Bright Places, more About Time. It’s something we’re all wondering. There may be impracticality to some of Mara’s future plans, but I can’t say the confidence and lust for life with which she envisions them isn’t attractive.
More than any other film to come out during this pandemic, Spontaneous understands it and what we’re collectively going through because of it. The love, laughs, sincerity, solemnity, and hope it provides are a comfort. An accidental miracle of a movie.
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