Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Spontaneous’ on Hulu and Amazon Prime, a YA Black Comedy Literally About Exploding Teens

Now on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video after debuting on VOD in October 2020, Spontaneous is named after the thing that killed that one drummer for Spinal Tap, and that other drummer for Spinal Tap. Headlined by star-in-the-making Katherine Langford (13 Reasons Why, Cursed, Knives Out), the film is based on a young-adult novel (don’t jump) about high school teens (hang on) who fall in love (don’t let your last pinky slip) and occasionally spontaneously combust into a fine, bloody mist. You up for this? Maybe you should be.

SPONTANEOUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Mara Carlyle (Langford) is a wear-combat-boots-to-prom type, but she’s post-Millennial, and a character from a YA novel, so that doesn’t mean she’s a Breakfast Clubber rejecto who makes herself look ugly on purpose. I mean, Mara gets along with her parents and only nurses mild animosity for the popular kids. And frankly, her “ANTI-YOU” patch on her leather jacket is three generations removed from the Sex Pistols. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have nooooooo future, because the kids in her senior class keep exploding randomly, and she could be next, who knows. So the classic-teenage fatalist within her emerges full bloom as her friends and rivals alike go boom.

“It was like a Cronenberg movie,” is the description of the phenomenon by one of her classmates, who’s cool enough to have seen Scanners, obvs. With the specter of doom hovering over these kids, some take a life’s-short/go-for-it tack, and Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is one of them. Mara is his crush. He randomly texts her. She replies kindly. They meet and he ends up holding her hair as she barfs because she ate too many shrooms, and when she looks up from the loo, she hallucinates like eight of this cute, wide-grinned dork. It’s love. “We should make out,” she says. Right: eww. But her lip gloss isn’t even mussed. She’s not even flush. He obliges, of course, because horny teens care not about vom breath.

It’s puppy love. Meanwhile, the world is turning upside-down, because the potentiality of instantaneous death has turned the jocks into liberal progressives, and Mira’s parents (Piper Perabo and Rob Huebel) admit that she’s got it “way worse” than they ever did. In the Dylan-Mara bubble, where nobody is exploding (yet?), they forget about the existential threat for a while and go totes adorbs, taking rides in the old ice cream truck he bought because f— it, you might die tomorrow, and re-enacting their favorite scene from E.T. when they and the rest of the senior class are quarantined in a plastic tent village so the government maybe can develop a drug to counteract the sudden gory PACHOWW and KAPLOOF that keeps happening endlessly and senselessly. Is this the world of a cruel god? Can humans use their science and shit to figure out what the hell is going on? Will Mara even live to see graduation?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s Warm Bodies meets Carrie meets Heathers meets The Fault in Our Stars meets that scene in Cronenberg’s The Fly where Geena Davis blasts Brundlefly into gooey bits with a shotgun.

Performance Worth Watching: Langford carries Spontaneous with her ability to deliver withering one-liners and earnest emotion with equal aplomb. She has terrific screen presence, and seems destined to cash in by playing a superhero in a tentpole picture.

Memorable Dialogue: Mara puts the horrible situation in perspective: “Could be worse, right? We could be Republicans.”

Sex and Skin: Some PG-13 makin’ out.

Our Take: Welp. You can’t say the premise isn’t original. And the blackened comedy of Spontaneous is endlessly preferable to dime-a-dozen hanky-soaking YA weepers, especially considering it ambitiously, if obviously, creates a gruesome, gruesomely funny metaphor for the awful shit teens deal with today, from school shootings to wearing masks and shuffling to class six feet apart mid-pandemic. Her parents are right. She has it so much worse.

Also much to its benefit, the film also does not feature an influencer-in-training posting filtered Instagram photos of blood-splattered classroom chalkboards as corny on-screen graphics illustrate the tens of thousands of likes stacking up. Can we just assume in every movie from here on out that social media is an omnipresent part of modern society that makes everything worse, and get on with it?

I have some questions, however. Are other teens in other schools also exploding? Is it a global phenomenon? Are sophomores poofing red too, or is it just this particular class? “Maybe we just have to graduate” to make it stop, Dylan suggests, floating a conceptual bon mot that the movie just lets hang in the air and get stale. Spontaneous starts with a terrific idea but doesn’t quite render it fully realized. Lively and entertaining as the movie can be — director Brian Duffield’s script, adapting Aaron Starmer’s novel Spontaneous, frequently crackles with vibrant comedy — it writes itself into a corner and fizzles during a repetitive third act, leaving it to Langford to sell us some pat coming-of-age truisms. Good thing she’s won us over four or five times by then.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Spontaneous is far from perfect, but Langford’s witty, empathetic performance makes it more boom than bust.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.