The Plague is director Charlie Polinger's feature debut after 15 years of making short films, and he is clearly an emerging master of mood and atmosphere, although at the expense of character. He has cited Stanley Kubrick and Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis as inspirations, and it shows in his work. The Plague unfolds like a paranoid dream, with each scene cutting hard into the next with just enough apparent rationality to keep the whole enterprise from collapsing, and it is precisely this teetering balance within that dangerous liminal space that makes The Plague so compelling, so engaging, so unnerving.