There’s a tenuous, treacherous line separating the literal from the pastiche, and few filmmakers can walk it better than those with the riotous confidence of someone who knows that truth is often better exposed through the glaring instead of the concealed. This rare gift guides the work of American director Jane Schoenbrun, whose newest feature, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” blasts its message with cards as open as the ripped guts of its characters.
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This ode to the slasher genre trails filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) as she makes her way to the pits of frosty Canada to meet the infamous Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who starred in the first film of what would become the hugely popular “Camp Miasma” series. While the first film endeared and horrified a generation, years of endless merch, trinkets, and spinoffs pushed “Miasma” toward the sad death of the overmilked IP. Over two decades after that first installment, the young Kris is tapped to revive the dormant series, ridding it of sour sexism and transphobia and ushering the story into the promised waters of the woke.
Schoenbrun’s “Camp Miasma” plays with the idea of exposition from its very first sequence, a heavily stylized timeline of the onscreen “Miasma” phenomenon that concludes with a Variety article announcing the reboot. It’s clear from there onwards that the film is unafraid to bring the real into the imagined, both when it comes to its meta film-within-a-film narrative as well as the many nods to the corroded cogs of the American film industry — and, perhaps most importantly, a pulsating, story-guiding cinephilia.
Sparsely portrayed studio execs throwaway comments on “fan service” and the opportunities of IP, as Kris spits criticism of how late capitalism filmmaking would rather regurgitate the tried-and-tested instead of even entertaining the notion of something new. Anderson’s Billy is fashioned as and often referred to as a modern Norma Desmond, an eccentric recluse whose life revolves around a single hurrah with acclaim and whose present is a crumbling shell of nostalgia and madness. Kris’s first success came with a Sundance breakout inspired by “Psycho,” and the “Miasma” series plays as a “Halloween” meets “Friday the 13th” meets “Scream.”
There’s much delight to be had in those constant nods to cinema greats, but even more in how Schoenbrun homes in on what made their previous film, “I Saw the TV Glow,” such an affecting and effective observation on how popular can singularly translate the thorny dichotomy of wanting. Einbinder’s Kris, much like Justice Smith’s Owen, developed an understanding of life and the world through the glare of a screen. As a little girl, the fictional director sat in the dark and fed a forbidden VHS tape into the player’s hungry mouth, just as hungry as her childlike curiosity. There, something magical and terrifying and fascinating appeared: a young woman, whose bulging eyes would leave a lifelong impression on the child. At first glance, the eyes seem to be holding fear. As we will come to learn, they also communicated a gnarlier sentiment: pleasure.
Circling back to the literal, Schoenbrun names their killer Little Death, the English translation of the French “petite mort.” The expression is poetically used to describe the brief, all-intense state of total surrender that happens during an orgasm — a sudden disappearance, a loss of consciousness, a small death. In the onscreen “Miasma” films, Little Death is described as a former camper who spent half their week as a girl and half as a boy, their difference leading to an ultimately tragic shunning. Played by Schoenbrun’s frequent collaborator Jack Haven, the villain is outfitted with a metal headpiece resembling both an air duct and an early cinematographer, featuring a square, centralized window framing the killer’s eyes and acting as a twisted mirror to their victims.
Kris spent a life running from the metaphorical little death and into the arms of the literal one. She never managed to fully lean into the primal urges of her sexuality, constrained by contemporary ideas of righteousness that stand in opposition to the unruly laws of desire. To her, pleasure can be found only in helplessness, not as much surrender as a violent inevitability. Billy built her life atop that same unsteady ground, expertly guiding Kris from the claustrophobic realm of the head and into the deliciously chaotic land of the body. Both Einbinder and Anderson excel in their portrayal of this long-awaited and almost dizzyingly intense encounter, leaning into the ludicrousness of the film’s premise not with the common disdain dedicated to parody but with total and utter devotion to Schoenbrun’s hyperbolic, ambitious vision.
The two central performances crown a film that feels utterly refined in its refusal to be overly polished. From the pristine work of costume design that fashions Anderson in Old Hollywood black velvet and big fur, to cult indie musician Alex G’s 80s inspired score sensually enveloping the duo and the intricately painted backdrops that give life to the hilly mountains framing Billy’s enclosure, “Camp Miasma” is a work of a director who is not only in full control of how form can amplify their message, but also clearly having a whallop of a time while at it. It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched. [A]
Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.
