Carpe Diem! [Distant Explosion Sounds]

Spontaneous is a movie about senior students at one particular high school spontaneously exploding. Literally, blowing up, spraying their classmates or surroundings with their own liquified bodies and everything that was once held inside of them. It’s also easily one of the best coming-of-age, borderline horror teen romances I’ve ever seen after Jennifer’s Body (seriously, I think my initial Letterboxd review of this was that I was shocked that it hadn’t been penned from the inkwell of Diablo Cody’s mind). 

“It was like a Cronenberg movie,” one student comments, while they’re all waiting around after the first incident, having freshly showered off one of their former classmates. It showcases all of the usual character tropes of a coming of age movie - there are the outcasts, the popular kids, and of course none of that would matter without a protagonist that’s a perfect balance of cool, edgy, and likeable-but-not-too-sweet. Despite all of these things that should be obvious shortcomings, Spontaneous is unbelievably charming. The premise - which again, is literally ‘teenagers have started to randomly explode’ - is almost laughably clear as symbolism shown as literal absurdity, and the lesson (Carpe diem!) is just shoved in your face from the first moment on, unrelentingly. I was already on board with all of it when I first sat down to watch this, though, prepared to just enjoy something a little silly with a cast that I really enjoyed from their previous works. I didn’t anticipate that I would walk away with a deeper understanding of what experiencing a deep grief over a peer at a young age would be like - something I had yet to experience - how to grapple with the inevitable end of relationships when the end in question is much more likely to be immediate and permanent, as well as an oddly unique look into teenage substance abuse. 

I’ve mentioned that the symbolism of students, these main character’s peers, literally vanishing in a second is pretty surface-level symbolism. The first girl to die is a well-liked student that the main protagonist recognizes and grew up next to for their entire academic careers despite the fact that they rarely crossed paths. What’s much less surface-level, though, is the conversations that follow, because while the explosions might be symbolic to the audience, the conversations are carried on in super literal terms. The main characters don’t often refer to these tragic and abrupt deaths as ‘incidents’ and ‘events’ - in fact, only the adults that are trying and failing to curb the frequency of them do that. The students, the people truly in the middle of the mess and not knowing if they’ll be next, have frank discussions with one another. They talk about seeing someone ‘blow up’ and ‘go bang’. They describe being sprayed in blood and shredded clothing. Early in the first act, our main character Mara has a conversation with long-time peer but new friend Dylan about that first explosion. He asks if she saw it happen - she didn’t. She returns the question and he says that he also didn’t see it, but he heard it happen. “It’s weird being right there, and missing it,” he tells her. Mara admits that she’s sad that she missed it - and that she feels guilty for thinking that way - but what an unbelievably honest feeling. Being directly next to a tragedy, especially one that goes on to immediately affect the way that you now have to conduct your day-to-day life, but not having truly experienced it is such a disorienting feeling. That is a feeling I’m far more familiar with than the actual close-up grief and tragedy that the characters spend the majority of the movie going through. This happens multiple times throughout the movie - Mara and Dylan look away, consumed with something else or each other, just long enough to miss the explosion but they never manage to wriggle out from under the consequences of it. What they do, though, is continue to push through their lives in a weird combination of nihilism and optimism. I also find that a relatable way of handling hardship, but I can only imagine how much more common that is of a survival technique for the teenager of the 2020s.

Fingers are pointed at a number of possible issues: drug use, the locations, diet, sexual activity, physical and mental health decline - the more ideas that are presented to the audience as possible causes for this epidemic of exploding students, the more clear it becomes that the explosions could be metaphors for real-world issues that people who are in the same age group as the main characters are facing and dying from every day. Gun violence is a clear answer, but it is of course still left open. Eating disorders. Suicide. It could also mean absolutely none of this. The constant exploding could just be exactly what it says on the can; both options still end up with the same consequence of hopelessness in youth and the feeling that they have no one to look out for them and help them but themselves. The ‘goal’ continually mentioned throughout the movie by various characters - both the high school seniors and the adults around them - is that they simply need to stay alive. Live through high school so they can make it to college. What to do in college after that is hardly of consequence, because not exploding before graduation is statistically random, and many of the students learn not to plan that far ahead. For cultural context, this movie came out in October of 2020 (there were ten school shootings that year in the United States, according to EdW.) The fear and grief turns into outrage in the second half of the movie until any real progress seems to have been made on finding a solution despite government officials promising that they’re working on a cure. Survival instincts morph painfully into recklessness and despite the jaw-dropping gorgeous cinematography, everything about this story starts to settle in over you like a damp cold that soaks all the way into you and doesn’t let you escape the discomfort until Spontaneous’s climax.

The main characters - Mara and Dylan - are trying so hard though. It might just be me, but an indomitable human spirit’ moment in the midst of tragedy will always get me right where it hurts (I cried through literally every single episode of The Handmaid’s Tale). In the same vein of school shootings, very similar themes were seen in HBO Max’s 2021 film The Fallout when friendships and relationships are borne out of the feeling of sinking helplessly and reaching out to grab another person to keep yourself afloat that you may never have interacted with without the shared trauma of a life-changing event. Despite Spontaneous’s Mara losing herself under the waves of grief for a while, the human way is to find each other and help in any way we can - even under extremely unlikely circumstances. 

It’s hard to watch Mara flail around in her depression and lash out at the remaining circle of people around her like a cornered animal but it’s even harder to experience the conclusion to Spontaneous and internalize what it says about grief and the time spent on it. There is no right way to handle your own tragedy or your close proximity to other’s tragedy, nor is there a correct amount of time to spend sitting with it, letting it twist itself into aggression, or guilt, or some other monster entirely. But because we can’t demand that grieving be quick and concise, it’s impossible to know when it has slipped over the line and become too much for too long, silently passing from the ‘time will heal all wounds’ side of the spectrum to the ‘enough time will make you crazy’ side instead. While they lay together at Dylan’s grave, his mother says to Mara: “None of you deserve this, but deserving’s got nothing to do with it.” Later, Mara’s concluding narrative includes the tidbit of information that after a while, the explosions stopped on their own, and everyone moved on. She of course describes it as ‘super anticlimactic’ in a sort of snarky, deadpan angsty-teen tone but that is truly the way that it works at the end of the day. Spontaneous tragedy paired with enough time to stew over the possible logic of ‘why me?’ is a deadly combination, and the only possible cure is other people.

If you enjoyed Spontaneous, I suggest checking out horror-comedy The Babysitter (2017), the screenplay for which was penned by director of Spontaneous Brian Duffield. I also suggest any of Diablo Cody’s works. If you, like me, really enjoyed Hayley Law’s performance as Tess, I can never unironically recommend CW Riverdale enough. She’s also unreal in Avan Jogia’s Door Mouse, if neo-noir is more your speed.