Don’t like now but there’s a boy staring at us…’
I love goofball high school comedies like Sex Education, and I love earnest sincere teen dramas like Euphoria. To pull off a convincing mix of those two opposing genres is nigh on impossible. Spontaneous aims to stand firm with a foot in both camps and ends up stumbling over the finish line instead…
Mara (Katherine Langford) and Dylan (Charlie Plummer) are the usual beautiful social outcasts that make up any high school movie. Their burgeoning relationship is as familiar to high school movies as cheerleaders and homecoming. What is unusual is the fact that all around them, their classmates have a pesky habit of spontaneous combustion – something that flies in the face of my own school experiences in which I wished everyday for many of my fellow students to explode in a rage of guts and fury, only to be disappointed at every turn.
The first act of Spontaneous is genuinely a lot of fun. Langford (most famous for carrying 13 Reasons Why across three seasons) and Plummer share a breezy chemistry, the quirky (ugh) script mostly stays on the right side of being annoying, and to be honest, watching a bunch of teenagers quite literally blow up is an invigorating cinematic experience.
Regretfully, the second half of the movie ditches the fun times in favour of sixth form level ruminations on life, love and the infinite void. It’s not terrible, but it’s definitely not good either. Langford does her best to sell her character’s breakdown, but she just comes across as too squeaky clean to convincingly pull it off, there’s not enough angst here to turn the tide for a movie that has already set out its stall as a gross out comedy.
Of all the films that populate the crowded teen market, Spontaneous is weird enough and unique enough to deserve a second look – the tragedy is that it could have been so much more.