Henlo frens! Sorry this blog is a little late but I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted to write about. I watched this very, very cute documentary called Babies this week which made me smile like an idiot but that’s for me. A couple of days ago I was aimlessly looking around for something to watch when I stumbled upon the movie Spontaneous and decided to watch it (spontaneously). The lead is a mischievous smart ass with curly blond hair named Mara so I was immediately into it. I have an intense love for mischievous smart asses with curly blonde hair whose names start with M. They own me. Always have.
So, the deal is that one day Mara is bored out of her mind in class because the teacher is droning on about the Louisiana Purchase or what have you when the girl who sits in front of her explodes. Just spontaneously combusts in a fountain of bright red blood and goo and everybody loses their shit and runs outta the classroom. It’s a very relatable and correct response. The next day everybody goes back to school freaked out but assuming they were all briefly part of a science fiction novel and everything will go back to normal. Until another kid explodes, then another and then two more. It’s a real mess. Nobody feels comfortable wearing white anymore OR is sure whether or not they’ll make it through the day without becoming a human water balloon.
Senior year is hella stressful, amiright? The Feds roll in with a team of doctors and they quarantine all of the seniors and do a bunch of tests on them to try and figure out what’s making them go boom. During that time the kids bond and but explode quite a bit until the doctors test a pill that seems to work and the kids are released back into the wild to try and cope with the sustained trauma of repeatedly watching people they know die right in front of them while also trying to make themselves care about trigonometry or whatever. All the while worrying that every one of them will be dead by the time graduation rolls around. Obviously, it’s hilarious. No really. It is. It’s clever and sweet and all of the characters are well rounded. The visual storytelling is inventive and fun. The soundtrack has this poppy electro-synth cover of Bye, Bye Love that plays over a montage of the kids goofing around in quarantine while people in biohazard suits clean up the never ending wave of bloody exploded teen gore. It’s dark comedy gold.
It’s a real shame that this movie came out in the middle of the pandemic when most people probably wanted to do anything but ponder their own mortality whilst watching a group of seemingly healthy people randomly drop (pop?) dead. I’m not going to go into a whole thing about symbolism and metaphors here because I don’t wanna. The story can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and I would rather let anyone watching find their own truth in there. I will say that this movie is good as hell though and it deserves attention and awards.
Spontaneous is way better and more thought provoking than those cliched, joyless, stuffy ass movies that people just love to throw Oscars at. Those movies lack soul and creativity but Spontaneous made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me want to dance like a goof with the girl I love (which isn’t hard to do but I appreciate any opportunity to feel that way). The movie also let me grieve and I think that I really needed that right now. Probably a lot of people do. Despite the grief and tears the ending is one of the most unexpectedly defiant and freeing things that I’ve seen in a long while.
It’s been really hard for me to find entertainment that I connect with lately so this movie came as a really wonderful and much needed surprise. Turns out I sometimes like surprises. I’m grateful that I got the chance to see it and while I know that randomly exploding children are not everybody’s thang this movie spoke to me. I highly recommend it and am officially adding it to the list of things that are extremely my shit. So maybe add it to your list of things to watch. Just don’t watch it while eating spaghetti. Or tomato soup. Or drinking fruit punch.
Holland + Harper Productions 