This Teen Horror Comedy Is Surprisingly Moving

gamerant.com:

Horror comedy Spontaneous is unusually sweet for a movie about spontaneous human combustion. Written and directed by Brian Duffield in his directorial debut, it stars Katherine Langford as Mara, a sardonic senior who's at school one day when her classmate randomly explodes in front of her. What appears to be a freak accident soon looks to be something worse when more and more students start popping like zits, spraying their innards over horrified onlookers.

The only thing tying these victims together is that they're all seniors, students in their last year of high school. This fact hasn't escaped Mara, who has since fallen for fellow senior Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a sweet-natured boy who takes his shot with her amidst the chaos. When she isn't fearing her imminent grisly death, Mara splits her time between Dylan and best friend Tess (Hayley Law), who just wants to grow old enough to see their childhood dream through: to retire to the beach like the «baller old chicks in kimonos» they idolized as kids.

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The three characters deal with the so-called «Poppings» in different ways. Mara and Dylan cope with crude humor, making jokes about the deceased amongst their usual «your mom» jabs, whereas Tess takes things more seriously, planning to graduate and leave their town, which news reporters claim is cursed.

As death rates increase, the surviving students of Covington High are put into quarantine whilst the government officials frantically try to find a cure. This sequence harks back to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and though the whole movie could be seen as an allegory for the pandemic, the Aaron Starmer novel it's based on came out in 2014. Still, the themes