A yarn about exploding teens is an intriguing comment on culture wars, Gen-Z despair and even Covid quarantine
Surely somebody somewhere, is writing a PhD thesis right now on existential nihilism, self-harm and postmodern horror in
American YA fiction, TV and films of the 2010s onwards. If not, I may write one myself, because there is a rich seam to draw on, and this latest one is sure to become part of the canon. Think The Fault in Our Stars meets 13 Reasons Why meets Chuck Palahniuk meets David Cronenberg’s Scanners. That last work is specifically referenced here because the film’s core conceit is that one day, for no logical reason, a teenager physically explodes during a maths class, splattering her fellow students with blood.
Narrator-protagonist Mara (Katherine Langford, who, in flashback, played the main plot instigator of the aforementioned 13 Reasons Why) is sitting right behind her exploding classmate and gets a particular drenching. The experience is, of course, traumatic for her, her best friend Tess (Hayley Law from Riverdale) and everyone else in the class, but life goes on. Mara tentatively starts dating cute geek and future pin-up for Non-Threatening Boy magazine Dylan (Charlie Plummer), who finally summons the courage to seize the day and ask her out in the wake of the spontaneous corporeal
explosion, and they plan to go to the homecoming reunion together. But then at a
Football game, another kid blows up, and then another, and soon the whole cohort is locked in a quarantined facility and fed drugs with a debatable success rate.