“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.” Greta Thunberg said that in 2019. Almost immediately, conservative media began to mock her. After all, she became an activist. She chose that life. Media ghouls interpreted the statement as a complaint about the strain of her activism. But there’s another interpretation. What if she meant that the fear, the anxiety, of knowing that the end was coming and no one was stopping it made it impossible to live a normal life? How do you enjoy childhood when you know that you will witness chaos and death on a scale once unimaginable? How does that awareness impact the choices you make? I haven’t seen much art that wrestles seriously with that question. So imagine my surprise when I came upon darkly comic teen coming-of-age story Spontaneous — and found that tackled the question with intelligence, sensitivity, and a profoundly bleak wit.
“When you said it might happen again, I thought, whoa.”
At first, no one is sure what to make of the exploding girl. It’s traumatic, certainly. Was it an… attack, of some sort? Terrorism? No one is sure. But Mara Carlyle (Katharine Langford) is sure of one thing: It’s going to happen again. And she’s right.
What she didn’t predict, however, was the effect the explosion would have on her life. Dylan Hovemeyer (Charlie Plummer), a nerdy classmate, confesses his love for her. And Mara… is into it. But their burgeoning romance takes on a new urgency when a second kid explodes, and then a third. How would you act when you knew that any moment could be your last?
Mara and Dylan want to find out — together.
“Maybe I’ve been wasting my entire life preparing for a year that may never come for me.”
Writing that plot synopsis felt weird. It’s accurate, but it’s not enough. So much stuff happens in this movie. Spontaneous is adapted from Aaron Starmer’s 2016 novel of the same name, and it definitely feels like it. There are a lot of events that happen here, and sometimes that detracted a bit from the flow of the film’s core relationships. For instance: After the first girl explodes, the students are taken to a police station and questioned, which we see, then let go, whereupon they go to a coffee shop, school, a football game, and then into a protective group quarantine home before being released to their parents houses and then returning to school. Spontaneous’ runtime is about 100 minutes. That’s a lot to deal with in 100 minutes. It sometimes feels like the human emotions that should drive the story were instead subsumed by plot.
Then again, some of those plot elements contribute to Spontaneous feeling a bit more timely than they probably thought while filming. There’s no way they could have known that COVID was coming. Even if it’s not the most well-handled storyline (despite an excellent montage), the story of a group of high school seniors losing their last year together to a quarantine hits harder today than it would have in 2016. The combination of anxiety, boredom, and hopelessness is well-captured. That said, a movie with a stronger voice would have excised this entirely, in my opinion. It belonged in a different film.
The movie is at its strongest when it focuses on the kids. The dialogue is stronger, the music choices are stronger — everything just clicks. A brilliant shot set to Tampa’s cover of “Bye Bye Love” captured Mara’s drifting emotional state perfectly. In All That Jazz, the song was used to signify its lead’s slow acceptance of his own death. Recontextualizing it to be about a teenager facing her own mortality is heartbreaking but powerful. I wish the film gave itself more room for subtler moments like that.
“So fuck it.”
I’ve never watched 13 Reasons Why. Spontaneous almost makes me want to, just to see more of Katharine Langford. She’s incredible here. The role demands a lot from her, cycling as it does between dark comedy, comedy-horror, coming-of-age drama, and teen romance. She was a delight to follow through it all. While a lot of Langford’s core character — a snarky, cynical dork looking for something new — is old hat in teenage comedy, she really brought it to life for me. Langford embodies the doofy, above-it-all humor of a smart kid perfectly.
Charlie Plummer has a tougher role. Of the two, his character is more stereotypically “YA-quirky.” He’ll reference the kind of classic films high schoolers rarely seek out, then show up in a used milk truck he impulsively bought two scenes later — and he still has to be believable and interesting as a romantic lead. To my surprise, he mostly nailed it. There’s a bit too much going on here to feel like a fully fleshed-out character, but Plummer is still charming and believable. He’s got good screen presence, and solid instincts as a romantic lead.
There really aren’t any weak links in the rest of the supporting cast. That said, I want to single out one more performer, Hayley Law. Law (Altered Carbon) could come off as a stick in the mud. Her role is simultaneously more grounded and less serious than Langford’s. But Law, a relative newcomer, is expressive and interesting in a small role. Part of my problem with the quarantine subplot is that I genuinely want more time with characters like Law, who shows a different way for characters to cope — and is exciting to watch.
“I’m gonna tell you how I feel.”
I’ll be up front: I’m going to get into some spoilers in this section. If you don’t want to know where the movie ends up going in the end, skip to the next section. Thanks!
So, when I was young, I really liked A Walk to Remember. Yes, that Mandy Moore-led Nicholas Sparks movie. It was sad, but in an easy-to-digest way. There were no surprises, no real conflict. It was like porn: A simplified, easy-to-digest version of a more complex experience. That eventually gave way to The Fault in Our Stars, which tried to acknowledge some of the complexities. There are aspects of it that are surprising, and the movie tries not to shy away from the emotional reality experienced by the two leads.
Spontaneous is the best version of that basic story — young love, imminent mortality — that I have seen.
Look, you can probably guess that Mara is going to lose someone early on. Will it be her new boyfriend, Dylan? Her best friend, Tess? You know she’s going to lose someone. How does a movie make that emotionally resonant, then?
I will say, the transition to the film’s third act is among the most harrowing things I’ve seen in years. Brian Duffield had previously been playing the explosions for laughs. They caught you by surprise, but they happened mostly off screen — just a shower of blood spraying everything on camera. Here, however, the mood is different. The camera gets shakier as kids stampede through the high school, trying to find a way out. Explosions of blood burst from the middle of a crowd of panicked children. It’s a genuinely harrowing scene.
It brought to mind the image of a school shooting. The explosions evoked the senselessness of the violence. Grounded by Langford’s performance and Aaron Morton’s cinematography, the tone rapidly changes from dark comedy to outright horror. To my shock, it nails that transition. The final third of the movie follows Mara’s profound depression at the brutality of Dylan’s death, which comes with a suddenness that is just as brutal for us as it is for her. Spontaneous becomes a bleaker, sadder story, but it handles the change beautifully.
“I’m not gonna be scared anymore.”
This is a film about stolen childhoods and broken dreams. It’s not a dour movie. It’s not a slog. But it is powerfully emotional, at times almost uncomfortably so. This is a movie that takes grief seriously. It is about the grief of surviving, the horror of being pushed into a dangerous and more chaotic future. It’s also incredibly funny.
Those tonal shifts are going to really fuck some people up. Hell, they fucked me up. I found parts of Spontaneous genuinely tense to the point of inducing anxiety, and I did not expect that going in. Writer/director Brian Duffield has previously written a string of interesting messes — The Babysitter, Jane Got a Gun, and Underwater. Here, directing for the first time, he’s considerably more deft at managing some of the tonal shifts that may have derailed some of those films. Duffield manages to make blood-splattered teens funny, poignant, and horrifying, sometimes all at once. That takes skill.
Most importantly, Spontaneous understands teenagers. The movie gets the way they can be thoughtless and cruel in one moment, vivacious and caring in the next. It gets the way they mask pain and fear with snark. And it manages to use those traits to ground a story that might seem ridiculous on its face. Spontaneous‘ flaws are present and easy to see. But it still hit me like a goddamn punch to the gut. And I still loved it.