Spontaneous (2020) review

At Covington High School, students - for no real reason - just start spontaneously combusting, which is so bizarre it forces the FBI to come in an investigate, and complicates the budding relationship with Mara (Katherine Langford) and Dylan (Charlie Plummer).  It has the right idea in trying to make an allegory for the rash of school shootings that have happened in the United States over the past few decades - Columbine, Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas being major incidents - but it completely whiffs the delivery: it's a tonal nightmare, alternating uneasily between teen comedy (although they don't talk like that in real life), drama and horror, switching from being flippant to pleading for sympathy.  No explanation is ever given for the explosions, and the less-than-ideal ending is just another reiteration of carpe diem ... which John Keating put much more eloquently.