Growing Up (and Blowing Up) in ‘Spontaneous’
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By Elliott Cuff
We all share a common understanding during our teenage years, and that is that life isn’t easy: anxiety in the classroom, peer pressure in the hallways, the stresses of schoolwork and home life—not to mention the grave threats today’s youth face every day.
But whether you suffered through a difficult childhood or an angsty adolescence, it’s unlikely you had to sit with the knowledge that your body could inexplicably combust without warning. That’s the grim reality for the characters in Brian Duffield’s genre-bending 2020 film Spontaneous, who have to contend with not only the typical trials of the teen years but also the reality of acknowledging their own mortality.
For them, managing to “survive school” is more than just hyperbole.
Blood-soaked, laugh-out-loud body horror
Adapted from Aaron Starmer’s young adult novel, Spontaneous is a coming-of-age film that weaves moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, disturbing body horror, and genuine human tenderness. Katherine Langford and Charlie Plummer are the two stars, both playing teens whose lives become intertwined while their classmates quite literally explode around them, leaving nothing in their wake save for a crimson mass of shredded viscera and blood-soaked clothes.
Spontaneous does notably spare us the actual sight of children exploding, often placing impending victims at the edge of the shot or slightly out of focus before they internally detonate, not like a bomb but “like a balloon” as Langford’s Mara explains. We witness our first explosion in the opening scene, where a girl spontaneously combusts and showers her classmates in blood, leaving her desk unscathed and her clothes having taken only cosmetic damage.
Langford’s narration throughout is chock-full of gallows humor, establishing the film as a dark comedy but with far more up its sleeve. It isn’t until about an hour in that all of the pieces begin to come together and the film dramatically shifts tone. Duffield does this beautifully by turning the entire screen crimson in an instant, lingering on the all-red image just long enough for us to realize what has happened.
In a single moment the film flips on its head, and we begin to see the underlying theme emerge, previously hidden behind blunt-force body horror and appropriately teenage inappropriateness.
Love amidst the looming horror
Spontaneous never provides us with an actual cause for the inexplicable explosions, nor does it conjure up some roadmap to miraculous recovery. It simply presents the situation as something the students must learn to live with. They are, of course, fearful for their respective futures, because what could be more horrifying than knowing you could be ripped from this mortal coil at any moment without warning?
It’s easy to see, then, how the comparisons to school shootings might emerge, or how you could link the randomness of teenage death to real-world problems that plague today’s youth. Choosing to set the film in a school isn’t accidental, as it evokes difficult-to-stomach scenarios our news cycle has become all too familiar with.
But the film doesn’t dwell in the realm of hopeless nihilism or teenage existentialism. It’s important that Mara runs the gamut of emotions throughout Spontaneous because it’s through her we see what the film is ultimately trying to say. Mara miraculously finds love underneath the shadow of looming horror, the kind of teenage love you can’t help but beam over while watching it naturally unfold.
But life isn’t all roses and hand-holding. Fear governs how we choose to live our lives. It motivates us and it warns us, and it helps Mara see how each day is valuable to her.
Seize the double meaning
It’s perhaps unsurprising to see Spontaneous embrace a carpe diem mentality as the film closes out, but that “seize the day” message is partnered with the unavoidable fact that none of the teenagers could explain what was happening to them, and would have to contend with life-altering trauma forever. They couldn’t do anything about it, and neither could the adults who were supposed to protect them.
Spontaneous initially appears to be a self-explanatory title for the film: it’s a story about teenagers who spontaneously explode, case closed. But the final act gives it a double meaning. It no longer simply refers to the central narrative device that drives the plot; it’s also the film’s plea to embrace life and not take the time given to us for granted, no matter the cards we might be dealt.
Mara comes to understand the value of the time she has left, as we learn from her comically brash and expletive-laden concluding voiceover. Signifying her growth and coming of age, she acknowledges the inevitability of death and the uncertainty over when it could arrive. But she chooses to move beyond her fears and worries. She thinks forward, imagines herself seeking out her dreams, and then commits to seeing them through.
Spontaneous is packed full of the typical coming-of-age conventions. It has teenage angst, romance, laughs, tragedy, and a surfeit of style. It also has multiple instances of bloody carnage. But in the end it all feels cathartic, and it leaves us to ponder our own lives and whether we’re living them as we should.
Because after all, as Mara poignantly puts it: “All I know is I could die any second now. Hell, so could you.”
Elliott Cuff is a writer, journalist, and film enthusiast. Follow him on Twitter @CuffWrites and Instagram @elliottlovesmovies.