BEWARE SPOILERS

We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the film being discussed.

Spontaneous (2020) is available on Amazon Prime as of this writing (4/25/2021).

We’ve hardly had a chance to see her face when suddenly, forty-three seconds into Spontaneous (2020), we see the rest of teenager Katelyn Ogden (Melanie Barros) splattered over her classmates and classroom walls and in a pile of gore seated in front of protagonist Mara (Katherine Langford).

She misses the whole thing, having bent over to pick up her pencil the moment before Katelyn erupted in a geyser of viscera. Mara tells the audience, “Katelyn Ogden was a lot of things, but she was never particularly explosive--in any sense of the word.”

Director Brian Duffield’s debut feature film, adapted from Aaron Starmer’s 2016 novel, is a masterwork of metahorror, a bizarre mashup of teen genres: slasher, comedy, sappy romance, drama, and at one point, Tik Tok video. More than that, though, Spontaneous offers an unflinchingly honest and throbbingly raw discussion of school shootings from the perspective of the young people forced to endure them.

Spontaneous combines gallows humor and whiplashing tonal shifts to pile on emotional intensity, capturing two-plus decades of ongoing trauma on two generations of children the United States has failed to protect from mass shootings due to its own systemic incompetence and lack of political will. The film leaves you numb, reflecting the effect of personal and national trauma, as well as the necessity of overcoming it.

I Used to Have a Brother

Greg died just before I turned twenty-one. Born with a diseased heart, he was lucky to live past the age of two, let alone twenty-four. To get there, he endured countless surgeries, including a heart transplant and, after all the drugs and anaesthetics had ruined his kidneys, a new used pair of those too, along with more than a decade of dialysis.

We were both angry kids. You would be too if you were dying from the day you were born. Or if your sibling were.

When we were around nine and twelve years old, our parents put us in this educational summer program. Greg was mouthy and liked the attention that came with getting into trouble, but he liked it best when I was in trouble with him. For whatever disruptive thing we’d done, we weren’t allowed to go on a field trip--really, a short walk--into the Wintergreen Gorge, a long canyon running through our hometown in Erie, Pennsylvania.

But we were left unsupervised, and Greg convinced me to go with him to the top of the Gorge, above the group. We stood, listening to their voices echoing up as they talked about the ecosystem, skipped rocks, and made their way downstream.

Greg threw a small stone down through the trees. It sifted through the branches a bit before the clack against the shale creek bed reverberated back up the Gorge walls. He grabbed two more and handed one to me. This time, rather than a clack, we heard a kid’s voice: “Ow! That rock just came out of the sky!” We threw a handful more and ran away.

This was back when Greg could run, after the heart transplant and before his kidneys started to go. Later, if he ran more than a few yards, he’d throw up. By then, his stays in the hospital were longer, and when he was home, he was tired, irritable, weak, and constantly nauseous.

I don’t think anyone ever found out we threw those rocks.

“We Would Actually Love to Survive. That’d Be Sick.”

Katelyn Ogden’s death is treated as a tragedy, but with an air of gallowsy irreverence. Mara’s classmates spout strange posthumous compliments: “She was so nice. I was gonna ask her to prom,” one boy says, to which another replies, “She was very open minded.” Solemn nods all around. During a memorial service at the school auditorium, another classmate sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” a lovely song that is, as Mara puts it, “definitely sexual.” As her classmate’s voice gives way to Cohen’s, we’re given a glimpse of Katelyn’s funeral, after which her father peels the girl away from the family of stick figures on the car’s rear window.

Each of these moments is moving in its humanity, but also a bit silly when subjected to Mara’s drab narration and dialogue with her friend Tess (Hayley Law) and soon-to-be boyfriend Dylan (Charlie Plummer). At this point, we find ourselves in a teen romantic comedy. Mara takes shrooms while Tess supervises, and the scene unfolds into a meet cute with Dylan, who holds her hair back as she vomits in the bathroom of a local diner.

Their relationship develops quickly, and when the next kid explodes, they both miss it, lost in their own romantic banter during homecoming, when football player Perry Love (Jarrett Carlington) “pops.” Again, the community reacts in both painfully and humorously human ways. One of Perry’s teammates, during another auditorium service, tells the school,

And when my bro came out to us in sixth grade. We loved him. Because he was our best bro. And we’re progressive like that. Our boy … Our boy was too much rock for this world, bitch!

His other teammates stand, and everyone starts WHOOing and shouting and clapping in a strange show of adolescent masculinity during such a somber moment.

Scenes like this have a way--at least they did for me--of not letting you see the pattern at first. For me, it was the third death, almost thirty minutes in, when I started making connections. This one happens during a party in Perry’s honor. We don’t even learn her name. Instead of a memorial scene, we see Mara and Tess called in to help the utterly unhelpful FBI Agent Rosetti (Yvonne Orji):

Rosetti: So, you ladies blow people up?

Tess: Uh, no, ma’am.

Mara: Do … Do you think there’s someone killing everyone?

Rosetti: I think we’ve effectively ruled that out. I mean, unless there’s a mad scientist or a warlock on the loose.

Tess: Kids are literally blowing up, so I mean, that could be a possibility, right?

Rosetti: If you believe in warlocks.

Tess: I don’t know what I believe anymore.

Mara: Do you have any idea why it’s happening?

Rosetti: At the moment, no. But we’re close to figuring it out … or so I’m told.

Mara: Wait, so what you’re saying is we’re fucked.

Rosetti: No, what I’m saying is I need help. Listen, everyone’s scared, and scared people all want the same thing: to survive.

Mara: Right, yeah. We would actually love to survive.

Tess: That’d be sick.

My Goth Phase

Greg took me to my first hardcore show at Erie’s Forward Hall, where I would spend much of my teens getting the rage pounded out of me in mosh pits. Now that I think about it, my moshing might be one of the reasons Greg stopped going to hardcore shows. As our mom reminded me every time we got into a fight, if I punched him in the wrong place, I could kill him.

This was 1999. That April, two high school seniors murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher in Columbine, Colorado. They wore trench coats and listened to much of the same music my friends and I listened to.

I was in eighth grade, the start of my goth phase: spiked necklaces, wide-leg jeans, wallet chains, and fat Statue of Liberty spikes for hair dyed a new color every time the old one faded. Growing up in a conservative suburb of a conservative city, I’d gotten used to sideways glances, but I’ll never forget how people looked at me when, a few days after the shooting, I walked into a grocery store wearing a trench coat my dad had given me weeks earlier.

Aside from the coat, my clothing didn’t really resemble the shooters’, who just looked like a couple of normal, nerdy ‘90s kids. But politicians and pundits often blamed their rampage on the music they listened to, namely Marilyn Manson, and the videogames they played. If there was anything others knew about me, it was that I played videogames and listened to gothy nü metal.

Once, after a Very Christian classmate attacked me at lunch, in front of at least one teacher, for wearing a large gothic cross around my neck when I was quite publicly an atheist, I was sent to the principal’s office. Someone had complained that I worshipped the devil, pointing to the two spikes of hair that hung over my forehead as evidence.

Mr. Botts, what’s going on with the hair?

What do you mean?

The spikes. Why?

I like them.

Are you sure they’re not Satanic in any way? Some of your classmates think they are. The two spikes resemble devil horns, don’t you think?

No. They point down. Devil horns point up.

Nonetheless, can’t you see how some people might be offended?

So, the problem is that two spikes suggest devil horns, and that’s offensive?

Yes.

What about four spikes?

Four would be okay.

Or three?

Sure.

Meanwhile, Greg was in and out of the hospital so much, often due to a sudden medical emergency, that he essentially missed an entire year of school and eventually dropped out all together. I spent a lot of those nights alone, playing videogames, dancing wildly in my living room to chunky mosh riffs, and ordering pizza with the twenty dollars left for me on the counter with a note. The list of emergency phone numbers was always on the fridge. Sometimes I’d find a ride to Forward Hall and come home completely worn out and bruised, occasionally bloodied, and would sleep well into the afternoon the next day.

Unsubtle Omens

After their absurd conversation, Agent Rosetti enlists Mara and Tess to get drugs from their friends Jenna (Laine MacNeil) and Joe (Clive Holloway) to test for teen-exploding chemicals. When Jenna and Joe take Mara to pick up All of the Drugs, Joe explodes in the driver’s seat, leading to a horrifying moment in which Jenna climbs on top of her brother’s bloody remains to take the wheel as Mara digs his shoes out from under the pedals.

Just as you think they might make it out alive, Jenna pops, and Mara, unable to take control of the car, ends up upside down in a terrible wreck. Dylan finds her standing in shock in a nearby stream, trying to wash her friends out of her shirt.

This is the first time Mara’s actually seen one of the deaths, having missed Katelyn’s explosion while picking up her pencil, Perry’s while entranced in Dylan’s eyes, and the unnamed third tragedy while walking outside with Dylan at a party in Perry's honor. It’s also the first time her friends have died. Suddenly the “Covington Curse,” so named for the high school it afflicts, feels less like random, disconnected tragedies and more like unsubtle omens of imminent personal doom.

That feeling of imminent personal doom must be, I can only imagine, unique to every primary and secondary school student in the United States. I’m old enough that, by the time I graduated, four years after Columbine, schools hadn’t yet started the active shooter drills that became common for younger Millennials and appallingly routine for Gen Z kids. Instead, I lived with the constant anticipation that my brother could die at any moment.

All through my high school years, dialysis was destroying Greg’s body. At first, he would go to a dialysis center, where he would lie down while a machine removed his blood, cleaned it, and put it back in over several hours, work his transplanted kidneys, after his body rejected them, could no longer do.

When I was about eleven or twelve, my parents set up a home machine. Each night, I would take one of the boxes of dialysis bags from the hallway closet, lug it over to his room, and set it on the machine, where he and our mom would get him hooked up.

There, I’d see his bare body, covered in scars and tubes, misshapen where he had a permanent catheter inserted into his belly--because getting up to pee while you’re on dialysis is a non-starter. For more solid bathroom needs, he had a bedpan and a roll of toilet paper.

Sometimes something would go wrong with the equipment or we’d lose power in the middle of the night, and one of our parents would rush Greg to the hospital. Other times there’d be a leak in the dialysis or catheter tubing, and he’d wake up in a soaked bed. My mom would clean up and replace his sheets, and all of us would end up sleepless and dead tired the next day.

Eventually, it all becomes routine--school shootings, bullying, medical emergencies, imminent personal doom.

“What the Hell Is This E.T. Bullshit?”

After Mara’s changed out of her bloody clothes and into a clean set Dylan’s brought her, goons dressed in white hazard suits abduct the pair. A moment later, having watched the trauma of Joe and Jenna’s deaths, followed by a terrible crash and a moment of tender human connection, we find Mara in bed in the middle of the creepy science tent from E.T. and are treated to easily the funniest moment in the film.

Mara looks over the tubes hanging out of her and turns to see Dylan in similar condition in the bed next to her. She reaches out, index finger limply extended. For a moment, you’re expecting her to call his name or to say nothing as their eyes lock in a moment of intimate separation. Then, completely straight-faced, Mara calls out, “E.T.”

“Elliot,” Dylan replies.

And the two repeat the iconic lines again and again, growing louder each time as they (and we) burst out laughing.

What makes the scene so incredibly funny isn’t the content; it’s the context. The tonal shift is dramatic, sudden, and follows on the heels of the film’s most upsetting scene so far.

After another teen explodes, this time immediately following a politician’s in-person thoughts and prayers, a montage of pills and exploding bodies ensues. By the end, the E.T. scientists decide, even if they don’t have a way to protect the kids, the kids need to be in school.

A short while after they go back, and after much trial-and-error, scientists think they’ve found, not a cure, but a “Snooze Button.” The idea seems to be that these high school seniors are just trying to do too much. They’re overloading themselves and just … exploding. This pill is meant to calm them. To let their brains rest a bit. Like the snooze button on a morning alarm.

We get about fifteen minutes of relief before the floor drops out and we find Covington High in a freefall of horrific tragedy. While explaining the Snooze Button, a scientist asks a volunteer named Steve to pat his head, rub his belly, stand on one foot, jump up and down. Just when she’s about to ask him to, I don’t know, spin in a circle, and just when Mara says, “This is bullshit,” Steve explodes.

Then more kids explode. Mara slips in their gore and falls to the ground as everyone flees the classroom. Dylan picks her up and pulls her by the hand into the hallway, where yet more kids explode. And more. And more. And more.

They don’t even know where they’re running. Away from their exploding classmates. Around them. Through them.

Mara and Dylan finally get outside, and as they’re embracing and making sure each other is okay, Dylan says, “I’m just glad you’re still here.” And suddenly, he is not.

“All of My Friends & Boyfriend Are Dead.”

Greg introduced me to pot when I was fifteen. We self-medicated together. I smoked for anxiety--though I didn’t understand that at the time--brought on by daily bullying and the obvious stress of having a dying brother. Greg smoked to help the appetite he’d lost to one or more of the tens of pills he took every day to keep from rejecting his transplanted organs or to fix a chemical imbalance brought on by one or more of the other pills.

Weed turned into a bonding activity. After we’d get into a fight, we’d smoke it out. Parents being unbearably parental? Smoke it out. Just got back from three months in the hospital? Nurse who’s new at drawing blood bruised the hell out of Greg’s veins? Smoke it out. Another one of my friends died in a drunken car wreck? And another one of alcohol poisoning? Get everyone together and smoke it out.

Early in 2006, we went to visit our dad in Florida. While we were there, Greg had to go to a local dialysis clinic, where he developed an infection of the peritoneum. I flew home alone because I had to get back to school. Greg eventually made it back too, once the doctors thought they had the infection under control. They didn’t.

He went back into the hospital within days of getting home, and he died within weeks.

I entered a stoned and drunken haze. Everything felt flat unless I was high or drunk, preferably both. I’d go into his room in the basement to feed his ferret. Then I’d sit with a bottle of whiskey and play videogames. I'd wake up in the middle of the night in his bed, the ferret having shat in a corner somewhere.

Eventually I moved into his room and lived that way full-time when I wasn’t working or getting stupidly drunk at punk shows at The Beer Mug.

After Dylan’s death, we see Mara throw a Snooze Button pill into the toilet and fall into a state of deep and relentless grief. She can’t talk to anyone and can’t leave her room, not even for Dylan’s funeral. Eventually, she spirals into self-medicating and excessive drug use.

The film treats this post-climactic depression with an even darker sense of humor, now unmistakably meant to dull the overwhelming tragedy bearing down on Mara’s life.

In a scene resembling an instructional Tik Tok video, an already drunk Mara walks us through a cocktail recipe for a blood-red drink called “All of My Friends and Boyfriend Are Dead.” The camera cuts to her heart-broken father Charlie (Rob Huebel):

I’m not equipped to deal with this.

I know, right? But I’ve literally found one thing that makes that feeling go away.

What is it?

[Whispering] Alcohol. Shhhh.

Why are you whispering?

Cause it’s a secret. Cause I’m underage. [No longer whispering.] Don’t tell anyone though.

She spends the next several scenes drowning in booze very publicly and brazenly, silently daring the adults in her life to stop her. They don’t.

At one point, Agent Rosetti finds her stumbling drunk out of a liquor store with unconcealed stolen tequila, and she (accidentally) throws a bottle through Rosetti’s rear window. The subsequent confrontation with her parents warps into her father yelling at her, not for drinking, but for telling him the truth when he asks where she gets the alcohol: when she’s not drinking her parents’ stash, she’s stealing it.

None of the adults answer her obvious and agonizing cries for help until Dylan’s mother Denise (Chelah Horsdal), late at night, finds her lying in the dirt atop Dylan’s grave. Denise lies in the dirt next to Mara, physically placing herself in a similar perspective, and listens. When she thinks she understands, she offers what she can.

Even in this tender moment, in which a grieving mother who’s lost her son consoles his grieving lover, the film cracks a joke with a well-timed pop culture reference. Denise first says, softly, “You all don’t deserve this,” and then offers a line stolen from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992): “But deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Sometimes there’s little to be done or said to help someone cope with personal trauma. That’s not the case here. The outrage of Spontaneous is that its adults, with the exception of Denise, are utterly unhelpful. And the greater their position of power, the more useless they are.

Mara's parents and school officials ignore Mara’s drinking because it feels impossible to tell a girl--hard to even call her a girl at this point--whose friends and boyfriend have all just died, that she can’t drink because she’s not an adult. It's deeply upsetting to see, but then again, it's hard to blame them. No average person is “equipped to deal with this.”

But the film points squarely at (primarily but not only) republican legislators, who, for almost twenty-five years now, have refused to take any substantive steps to keep guns out of the hands of kids or to understand why they’re killing each other in the first place. Except by installing metal detectors in high schools and having armed officers patrol their halls.

Because guns, you see, don’t kill people. People kill people, or so we’re told. And if these kids are killing people, then they’re the problem, not the society that values the right of pretty much anyone who wants a gun to get one over the lives of its young people.

Thoughts & Prayers

After Greg’s death, I heard the usual platitudes: “He’s in a better place,” “He’s in my prayers, and so are you,” and worst of all, “God must have had other plans for him.” I don’t know that there was anything anyone could say that would’ve helped, but religious platitudes for an atheist and his dead atheist brother felt downright insulting.

In the end, Mara delivers an extended speech that sounds to the words Sufjan Stevens sings over and over again, “We’re all gonna die.” “It’s inevitable,” she tells us, so what can you do but carpe diem? “I’m not gonna waste time waiting for a day that may never come for me.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but the real wisdom comes earlier in the film, slipping under the radar as a joke while Mara and Denise are lying on Dylan’s grave. No, not the Clint Eastwood bit. Although that is a good line.

Mara asks, “What am I supposed to do now?”

Denise replies, “Do you wanna come over for dinner next week?”

It’s not words that she’s offering, not really, and it’s certainly not thoughts and prayers. She’s offering an ear and a supporting hand from a grieving parent to a grieving teen.