When you’ve read enough YA novels or watched adaptations of said novels, you start to pick up the tropey connections between them. Like my friend Joe Lipsett would say in his podcast Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr, you could play YA Bingo with how similar the tropes are, between each novel/movie. Teenagers talking about old movies? Check. One or more dead parents? Check. Adults are useless? Check and mate. I expected all of these and more in Spontaneous, a dystopian look at growing up in a world where you could die at any moment. But what I wasn’t expecting was the way in which Brian Duffield’s directorial debut would use those tropes against me.

It begins like a lot of young adult movies, in a classroom at Covington High School filled with apathetic and antsy students bored to death while the offscreen teacher drones on about pre-calc. It’s all too picture perfect until student Katelyn Odgen (Mellany Barros) explodes in a Cloverfield-esqe burst of red that paints the students, the floor and the ceiling with enough blood to make Johnny Depp’s death in A Nightmare on Elm Street seem quaint. Sitting right behind the first victim is senior Mara Carlyle (Katherine Langford), who missed a blood blast to the face because she had just bent to pick up a pencil.

The police immediately round up the students and keep them isolated while they ask probing questions and try to get to the bottom of what’s going on. And when one student asks why they’re keeping them, Mara responds that they’re waiting to see if it’ll happen again. After an awkward pause, a kid says, “It was like a Cronenberg movie” and Mara is the only one to burst out in harsh laughter. The Cronenberg fan is Dylan (Charlie Plummer) and this is their anti-typical meet-cute.

After Katelyn’s funeral, Mara and her best friend Tess (Hayley Law) eat at a dinner, shell-shocked over the events, and Dylan drops in and it’s like kismet. Mara and Dylan become inseparable as they begin a relationship at a time when any moment could be their disastrous last. Because while everyone hoped that Katelyn popping like a zit would be the end of things, Mara tells us, “It happened again. It happened again a lot.”

For most of the first act, Spontaneous ticks off a lot of the young adult tropes you’d expect as it mixes a biting sense of acerbic dark humor with a traditional high school romance. Strip it of its sci-fi/horror trappings and Duffield’s film could be 2020’s answer to Easy A, with its witty and charming two leads who spout dialogue that’s been too-perfectly written. But the undercurrent of violence keeps the film from diving into schmaltzy territory. Even with the occasional explosive death, Spontaneous still lulls you in with very familiar character beats and witty humor as it charts the romance between Dylan and Mara from meet-cute to first kiss to the eventual admission of love.

But like 2020 has done to everyone, Spontaneous throws a curveball and continually escalates the horror and the stakes. The combustions become a own jump scare; a ticking bomb that you can’t ever predict or expect. One particular sequence involves Mara in the car with two other people who pop and send the car careening on its side, leaving Mara alive but shell-shocked. It’s here that the film starts to tighten the screws and the message slowly seeps in, with Mara panickedly trying to rub the blood from her clothes while stammering, “I tried to get them off but they won’t get out of me. They won’t get out of my clothes.” And this is all before the hazmats show up. The quarantines. The politicians and the media who’ve dubbed the combustion as the Covington Curse start to profess solutions. The picketing. The protests against the kids and their lives.

In a surreal nod to both 80s teen comedies and an accidental homage to our current lives, Spontaneous even gifts us with a montage set to a cover of The Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” as the scientists work on a cure while the teenagers are kept in quarantined isolation. But unlike almost every happy montage that’s used to show the process of time and actual progress, this one is punctuated with explosive beats of kids exploding, painting their fellow friends and bawling classmates with buckets of red. The juxtaposition of the cheesy breakup song with horrendous and senseless acts of violence hits hard in a way that surpasses the darkly comedic bent of the montage.

The montage works because the young adult tropes and the vaguely paint-by-numbers romance is ultimately Spontaneous’ secret weapon. It disarms you before it truly digs into the melancholic and existential fears of being a high school student in a world where violence can erupt at a moment’s notice. Even without the obvious and timely comparisons to quarantines and uncertainty we find ourselves struggling with in a COVID world, Spontaneous hits hard with allusions to gun violence and the uselessness of the adults who are supposed to protect them. The government officials who respond to violence with empty statements like, “you have every reason to be angry but I just want all of you to know that you have our thoughts and prayers.” It might be slightly on the nose, but Spontaneous is an angry middle finger fuck you to the status quo.

“I think this is our life now,” Mara despondently says at one point while her parents’ mantra becomes, “we just gotta get you through graduation.” So, I guess, in a way it is 2020’s answer to Easy A as it takes the tropes high school romance and YA films have conditioned us to expect and utilizes the threat of bodily explosion as a metaphor for the threat teenagers live with every single day.

Spontaneous front loads its jokes and wittiness to go down easy so so that by the midpoint, it can turn on a dime and explore what it’d be like for a high school student to continue to survive with PTSD after traumatic events. Where the specter of death, unseen but undeniable, hangs over the survivors who must figure out ways to carry on and cope. Who face an uncertain tomorrow. As the narrative slides into the denouement, I found myself both immensely sad and pissed.

Spontaneous is a teenage romance that tries to find meaning and love in strange and unusual times where violence can explode in a moment’s notice.