Director: Charlie Polinger
Charlie Polinger's feature debut takes a simple, terrifying premise — every child on Earth asleep for ten years — and lets it curdle into a night nobody who lived through it will forget.
What is The Plague about?
A decade after an unexplained illness put every child on the planet into a deep, unbreakable sleep, the night finally comes when their eyes open again. There is no gentle reunion. The kids who wake up are changed, and within hours a quiet farmhouse becomes the front line of a war between generations. Parents who spent ten years mourning, praying, and preparing are suddenly forced to decide how far they will go to survive their own children, while the awakened kids close ranks against the adult world that raised them in absentia. As dawn approaches, the film narrows its focus to a handful of families trapped together, where every decision about trust, mercy, and self-preservation carries lethal weight.
Cast & crew
Joel Edgerton anchors the adult side of the story as a father forced to confront what a decade of waiting has done to him, while a large ensemble of young performers — including Everett Blunck, Kayo Martin, Lucas Adler, and Elliott Heffernan — carry the film's most unsettling stretches. Polinger, working from his own script, builds tension through the child cast's stillness as much as their outbursts.
Context & significance
"The Plague" is a 2025 horror feature shot as a US, UAE, Australian, and Romanian co-production, part of a wave of festival horror that uses a single confined setting and a ticking-clock structure rather than a large budget to generate dread. It sits closer to slow-burn folk horror than to jump-scare franchise fare, and its central image — a generation that simply stopped growing up and then returned changed — has drawn comparisons to classic body-horror premises built around childhood and isolation.
Where & how to watch
"The Plague" streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles, and the film's page — including this background and the FAQs below — is free to read without signing in. Watching the film itself requires logging into a K-Time account, part of a Farsi-first viewing experience built for Persian-speaking audiences who want clear subtitle timing and a Farsi interface around the content they watch.