Spontaneous is a high school rites of passage story as Mara and Dylan fall in love during their final school term. Of course it is a modern love story so there is much absurdly precocious dialogue, getting high and breaking of the fourth wall. It's all very smart-assed teen cool.
But there is a twist. Students in their school year are randomly spontaoneously combusting. In a bursting-like-a-balloon, blood everywhere sort of way. As you might expect this lends a certain uncertainty to day to day life. Knowing one might explosively pop at any moment does tend to focus the mind.
That leaves our central couple with the desire to live in
the present and a lot of the charm here comes from the very quirky yet
believable relationship they develop. Charlie Plummer (the kidnapped
hier in All The Money In The World) is an unusual presence,
perhaps a male equivalent of the now-cliched "pixie dream girl", and
makes a good match with Langford's cynically-shelled Mara.
But this all happens fairly early. Can such a premise really stretch to 100 minutes? On the evidence here I'll say yes. While the blowing up at first seems like a blackly comic gimmick, the second act doubles down on both the real and the metaphorical and its really hard not to draw parallels with the current pandemic. But since this was filmed in 2018 that's clearly coincidental but it is striking. Perhaps the allegory is for school shootings?
But by halfway through I had no idea quite where we were heading, and the film blindsided me again at the hour mark.
Many things help make Spontaneous stand out, one being the treatment of adult characters who are actually allowed to be three dimensional. Particularly impressive are Mara's parents, Yvonne Orji as the rather ineffectual FBI agent and Laura Di Cicco who has a mere single scene as Dylan's mother and is simply sensational.
You could criticise the ending for being a bit contrived but there is so much to like about this film that by that slight disappointment you'll probably be willing to forgive it. Good stuff.
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