Spontaneous

It’s funny as hell in a drive-in splatter movie kind of way, smart and insightful and respectful in its depiction of modern-day teens, brimming with sly and satiric social commentary — and legitimately profound.

This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.

Making his feature directorial debut (he's written such screenplays as Insurgent and Underwater), writer/director Duffield expertly handles the complex tonal shifts, keeping us on edge even as we're laughing. We're also thoroughly engrossed in the main characters' fates, thanks to the witty, perceptive dialogue and the two leads, who bring an unforced, charming naturalism to their performances.

Bloody good.

Whenever Spontaneous starts to run out of imaginative juice, it turns a tonal corner and either puts a smile on your face or wipes it off.

Bloody, fun and achingly heartfelt, Spontaneous presents a clever and original story about life, love and how suddenly things can change.

Spontaneous allows Langford’s Mara, blasé swagger incarnate, and Plummer’s stealth charmer enough unaffected sincerity to make it stick. Onto that sticky stuff, the script applies comforting reminders: Stuff happens. We don’t know how long we have. Seize the day.

Awesome, original teen flick about kids that start to explode senior year is charming, hilarious, a little scary and wonderfully refreshing. Starring Katheryn Langford (Love Simon) as a young woman who finds love with a charming loner played by a charming Charlie Plummer during this odd epidemic. The movie treats it's subject matter in a very genuine, smart way so it's never a full horror tinged comedy but more of a horrible event happening to funny people. Engaging and edge of your seat, its definitely one of the year's best films. ****.5/5

Absolutely horrendous DEI cast that you cannot help but giving a standing ovation when they die. Skipped a lot of it as the story is comprised of one liberal cliche after another, describing a depraved young generation that is probably the target audience of this unwatchable movie.

It was fun and certainly original, although it tends to repeat itself and sadly has two elements that largely prevented me from giving it a higher rating. One is the fatalistic tone that the plot includes in relation to the teen experience and the other is how much its protagonist tries to be "the sardonic, cool girl". If you're going to be petulant, you need to have a solid personality, but Katherine Langford's character definitely thinks that her attitude makes her more interesting, but it doesn't. And believe it or not, Spontaneous is a love story and perhaps the situation of its plot makes it different and more interesting because of how bloody and unexpected the situation is, but ultimately the teaching it portrays of how we can die at any second cannot avoid certain conventional patterns. This film s a directorial debut so the mistakes are understandable, it goes without saying this film lacked more strength in its orientation, but despite the aforementioned flaws, it entertained me long enough to get 3 stars out of me. But I still believe the film deserved a better lead character. Behaving like a jerk, just because you can, doesn't make you cool, just **** annoying.

The movie is so boring for me. It doesn't have any intense scenes or a scene that's very interesting. And Mara's acting is a bit annoying. It's just kinda eye-catching for potential movie viewers at first when you see the clips where there are a lot of people blowing up, but other than that it's a pretty boring movie. I'm sorry, not my cup of tea.

A movie about a deeply unlikeable teenager who learns nothing via a "mysterious" tragedy that means nothing. Because "life is a mystery". Facile and annoying.