10 Amazing Movies Nobody Knows About
2. Spontaneous
It's easy to picture another timeline where Spontaneous was a breakout hit at the speciality box office and cemented its status as a cult classic, yet this fantastic coming-of-age black comedy had the misfortune of being quietly dumped on streaming by Paramount in late 2020.
It makes little sense that the studio barely gave this thing a theatrical release at all given the timeliness of its subject matter, pertaining to both the then-raging pandemic and also America's never-ending issues with gun violence in schools.
Ignore the movie's undeniably terrible posters - which bafflingly paint it as a cloying teen rom-com - because Spontaneous' attention-grabbing hook sees students at a high school randomly start exploding from the inside out for seemingly no rhyme or reason.
Filmmaker Brian Duffield uses this delirious setup to explore mortality and fear of the unknown in a highly original way, girded by excellent central performances from Katherine Langford and Charlie Plummer as two star-crossed teens caught in the middle of the bloodily explosive epidemic.
Yet for all of its creativity and how expertly it mines emotion from an inherently absurd concept, it's infuriating how Paramount simply sent it out to die.