{"id":668828,"date":"2026-05-14T11:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/668828\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T11:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:54:12","slug":"teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-review-jane-schoenbrun-serves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/668828\/","title":{"rendered":"Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review: Jane Schoenbrun Serves"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf Jane Schoenbrun<\/a> is feeling the pressures of being their generation\u2019s highest-profile trans filmmaker, it shows in only the most enjoyably defiant of ways in Un Certain Regard opener\u00a0\u201cTeenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma.\u201d A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, as though workshopped by Eros, Thanatos, Colonel Sanders and the Jolly Rancher in the seediest recesses of a Blockbuster Video, Schoenbrun\u2019s delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet. Here, the director\u2019s perennial questions around gender identity and identification are sublimated into a tribute to the slasher genre that also serves as an exploration of the frequently fucked-up nature of female desire and a manifesto for giving yourself the permission to feel it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat writer-director Schoenbrun has also designed their movie as a delightfully meta in-joke on the Hollywood studio machine is evidenced by a terrifically overstuffed opening credits sequence. Designed by Mila Matveeva, it takes us through the history of the fictional \u201cCamp Miasma\u201d horror franchise, in which a spear-wielding, gender-fluid killer terrorizes the \u201cyoung and nubile\u201d visitors in a thickly forested lakeside summer camp. There\u2019s a parade of VHS covers, marketing materials, merchandising tie-ins, declining box office reports, and inevitably, a flurry of blogs both detailing the series\u2019 homophobia and transphobia, and attempting to reclaim it.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile an interestingly synthy, anti-melodic cover of REM\u2019s \u201cNightswimming\u201d plays \u2014 the contrapuntal music cuts are a constant kitschy pleasure, never more so than when the original movie\u2019s climactic orgy of bloodletting is accompanied by Counting Crows\u2019 \u201cLong December,\u201d a needle-drop as amusing as it is anachronistic. The titles then close on an illustration of filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder), the \u201cSundance wunderkind\u201d who has been tapped to helm the franchise reboot. Just in case the parallels were not already clear (both of Schoenbrun\u2019s previous features, \u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair\u201d and \u201cI Saw the TV Glow\u201d premiered to acclaim in Sundance), that\u2019s when the director\u2019s name appears.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKris is on her way to meet Billy Preston (played in the past by a tremulous Amanda Fix and in the now by a silky, scrumptious Gillian Anderson<\/a>), the star of the original \u201cCamp Miasma\u201d movie. Billy refused to return for any of its increasingly derided sequels and now lives in semi-seclusion on the very site where the movie was shot. Both women reject the idea that this makes Billy some kind of \u201cNorma Desmond from \u2018Sunset Boulevard’\u201d yet she does prove to have a fondness for turbans and for emerging dramatically from the shadows, heavily mascara-ed and ever-ready for her close-up.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth Anderson and Einbinder, in her first feature after her Emmy-winning breakthrough on TV\u2019s \u201cHacks,\u201d are\u00a0on superb form here. But it\u2019s the former\u2019s self-consciously iconic Billy gets the majority of the meme-able moments, such as when delivering the line like she\u2019s licking it off her fingers, she turns to Kris proffering a tray laden with KFC and drawls in her unplaceable Southern accent, \u201cDo you like \u2026 dipping sauce?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnderson appears to be enjoying her foray into Sapphic high-camp tremendously, and the supporting cast is speckled with equally game performers, from Eva Victor\u2019s punk DJ to Dylan Baker\u2019s insufferable studio exec, to Kris\u2019 lover Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her dopey hookup Thor (Aren Buchholz). But then everyone here, in front of and behind the camera, looks to be having a great time, which keeps the mood bouncy, however gory or splattery or thematically knotty the moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tProduction designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland are let off the chain with a succession of stylized interiors and lurid, artificial backdrops where painted snow sits heavy on fir branches beneath a peachy purple twilight sky. The very sun and moon themselves seem to emanate exclusively the bluish-pinky palette of colors recently dubbed \u201cbisexual lighting,\u201d and while Alex G\u2019s 1980s-influenced score swirls in the background, cinematographer Eric K. Yue has fun experimenting with other visual homages to slasher tradition. There are crash zooms and shaky P.O.V. cams, recurring eyeball motifs and split diopters, which even Kris gets excited about, pointing at with awe, \u201cSplit diopter!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKris is, after all, a movie dork, who cannot stop intellectualizing the things she loves and the sometimes unsavory reasons she loves them, long enough to be able to make them, just as her key sexual hangup turns out to be an inability to fully surrender herself to the fantasies that embarrass her but that might just get her off. In the second half \u2014 which uses the silliness of slasher convention to get to some fairly profound places \u2014 the theme of sexual confusion and erotic dysfunction, particularly as experienced by women, emerges from behind the spouting fountains of blood spurting from the necks of various decapitated unfortunates, as the film\u2019s most moving through line.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut what can an actress in her fifties and a filmmaker 20 years her junior have to teach each other? At first the central duo\u2019s intergenerational incomprehension is played for laughs. \u201cWhat\u2019s poly?\u201d asks Billy, and Kris must eventually concede that yes, it is kinda like cheating, only \u201cwith game nights\u00a0where you have to hang out with bisexual guys named Thor.\u201d But as their connection grows, the movie cuts closer to the emotional bone. After one fumbled encounter, Kris curls up into herself in shame and whispers, \u201cI\u2019m just so bad at sex\u201d; later Billy tells of losing her virginity and finding \u201cit was exactly as bad as I had always imagined it would be.\u201d Having bonded over this unusually frank confession of female sexual inadequacy, gradually, the older, more worldly woman inducts the younger, less secure one into the arcane acceptance of her own desire. Orgasms, and geysers of blood, ensue.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a love story between generationally different worldviews that are usually believed to be incompatible, Schoenbrun gets to portray the central relationship as a fantasy safe harbor, garlanded with Raisinets and popcorn, in which no one is judged for the misogyny, transphobia or other real-world problematics of what turns them on in their mind. It is Kris\u2019 stated aim, echoing with the failures of a hundred indie filmmakers gone before, that she\u2019s going \u201cto beat Hollywood at its own game.\u201d Perhaps, in smuggling trans allegories, voyeur theory, kink-positive feminism and transgressive fantasy roleplay into the candy wrapper of a movie about remaking a movie about a deranged serial murderer with a box on his head, Jane Schoenbrun has done just that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Jane Schoenbrun is feeling the pressures of being their generation\u2019s highest-profile trans filmmaker, it shows in only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,5328,75,42035,129553,199822],"class_list":["post-668828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-gillian-anderson","tag-jane-schoenbrun","tag-teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}