Review: Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma

There is a moment in Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma where someone gets spectacularly murdered while a deeply earnest piece of ’90s music plays on the soundtrack. Blood sprays, bodies fall, and Jane Schoenbrun lets the whole ridiculous thing unfold with the confidence of someone who understands that sometimes the distance between irony and sincerity is practically nonexistent.

That tension runs through Schoenbrun’s wonderfully strange follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow. This is a movie about slashers, sex, fandom, filmmaking, queer identity, problematic art, nostalgia, and the exhausting tendency to analyze the things we love until we’ve removed everything that made us love them in the first place. It is messy and occasionally indulgent, but it is also funny, horny, bloody, surprisingly sweet, and unlike almost anything else currently playing in theaters.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an up-and-coming filmmaker handed the opportunity to resurrect Camp Miasma, a fictional slasher franchise that has long since descended into the usual cycle of sequels, reboots and increasingly desperate attempts to keep its masked killer, Little Death, culturally relevant. Kris has a complicated relationship with the series. She recognizes its outdated politics and questionable depictions of gender, but the original movie also meant something profound to her growing up.

Her solution is to track down Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s final girl, who disappeared from public life and now lives at the abandoned camp where the movie was filmed. Kris initially wants Billy for her reboot. What develops between them is considerably more complicated.

Schoenbrun could have easily turned all of this into another satire about Hollywood cannibalizing its past. There are plenty of jokes about IP, legacy sequels and studios desperately trying to make old properties socially acceptable for new audiences. The amazing opening history of the Camp Miasma franchise alone is filled with the sort of absurd details that feel frighteningly plausible. But Schoenbrun is after something much more personal.

Kris is someone who understands movies intellectually before she understands them emotionally. She can dissect a shot, identify what is problematic and explain what a movie represents, yet struggles to articulate why an image actually makes her feel something. Her relationship with Billy slowly becomes an invitation to stop interpreting desire and actually experience it.

Einbinder is perfectly suited to that nervous energy. She makes Kris awkward, funny and painfully self-aware, frequently seeming like she would rather turn her own feelings into a film-school thesis than admit what she wants. Her comic timing keeps the character likable even when Kris becomes trapped inside her own analysis.

Anderson is playing an entirely different game, and she is terrific. Billy exists somewhere between faded movie star, seductive mentor and eccentric horror-movie oracle. With her exaggerated Southern accent, glamorous wardrobe and complete lack of embarrassment about anything, Anderson gives the film the larger-than-life presence it needs. More importantly, she and Einbinder create a genuine intimacy that prevents their relationship from becoming merely another layer of Schoenbrun’s cinematic argument.

For all its ideas, Camp Miasma is also frequently just a blast to watch. Schoenbrun clearly loves the trashy slasher movies being examined here. The fictional original Camp Miasma doesn’t feel like a smug parody of Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp. It feels like something that could actually have existed on a video-store shelf. Little Death, played with bizarre physical charisma by Jack Haven, is an inspired slasher creation, complete with an appropriately ridiculous costume and weapon.

When Schoenbrun finally lets Little Death loose, the violence becomes outrageous performance art. One extended massacre is staged with such joyful precision that it becomes simultaneously hilarious, disgusting and weirdly beautiful. Eric Yue’s cinematography similarly embraces artificiality rather than hiding it. Painted backgrounds, projected images, film grain and dreamy lighting continually remind us that we are watching movies within movies within memories of movies.

That layering can occasionally become exhausting. Schoenbrun is working through so many ideas that the film sometimes threatens to explain itself into submission. The movie is considerably better whenever it trusts Anderson, Einbinder and the imagery rather than verbalizing every connection between cinema and desire. But perhaps that contradiction is intentional. Kris spends the movie learning the same lesson.

Movies don't have to be morally perfect to matter to us. The things that formed our tastes can be embarrassing, outdated, stupid or even troubling, and still occupy some essential corner of our imagination. Growing older doesn't necessarily require throwing those things away. Sometimes it means understanding why they mattered and deciding what parts are worth carrying forward.

That gives Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma an unexpected warmth beneath all the blood and bodily fluids. Schoenbrun has made a movie about giving yourself permission; to desire something, to enjoy something, to make something and maybe even to love something without immediately preparing an argument defending why.

For a movie filled with this much death, Camp Miasma ultimately feels remarkably alive.

4.5/5