Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review: Jane Schoenbrun’s Latest Thrills

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the latest from filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, is all about desire. Of sexual liberation, the sweaty, rebellious freedom of release, and the inarticulate want for more. More and more and more. There is no easy satiation, even if the protagonist, Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), is constantly searching for satisfaction—for “la petite mort”—fleeting transcendence. Be it in the avalanche of gummy sweets and movie theater snacks that line her bedspreads to artistic intent and control, Kris yearns, her eyes constantly seeking.

That want is what drives the film through each bout of meta silliness and over-the-top splatter-gonzo fun (set to Counting Crows, no less). And it’s matched by the sheer magnetic, expressive direction that anchors even the vaguest dialogue. This is a film about feeling. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about the want to touch and devour, the want to reconcile with a medium you love that doesn’t love you, about salivating over KFC chicken and dipping sauces. It’s about the slashers of the ’70s and ’80s and the movie monsters built on the backs of queer people, othered to the point of becoming a monster to fear, rather than the victim of the story.

After tackling identity and the intoxicating appeal and addiction of communing online in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and what it means to bury yourself in an effort to separate from your true identity in I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun returns to deal more still with identity. But this time, it’s through the lens of slasher horror.

Hanna Einbinder and Gillian Anderson share palpable chemistry.

Einbinder stars as Kris Williams, a young, on-the-rise queer filmmaker who made the type of minor, critical waves with her debut that studios gun for. They’re talented but new, and therefore, in the studios’ eyes, impressionable and easy to control. Think of any indie breakouts tapped for reboots and Marvel IP. They hire her to direct a sequel to a once-acclaimed slasher franchise, hoping her identity will help keep people from remembering how transphobic the source material was.

To investigate the text and gain greater inspiration, Kris travels to meet Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). Billy was the film’s original final girl, who left the industry immediately after its release and became a recluse living on the original camp set. It’s there that the two meet, becoming enthralled with one another in a psychosexual exploration of self.

Caught in a state of near-constant arousal, often through the lens of her work, Kris finds herself shedding layers of her outer, more rigid demeanor. Between the gloves and jacket Billy playfully tugs off of her in the first display of real, tangible heat between the two, a furious orgasmic reckoning while meeting with studio reps, and her running through the woods in her underwear, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma embraces flesh.

The existential dread and thrills of Jane Schoenbrun’s work is on display.

But it’s not all about titillation because so much of the romance at the center of the movie is about the need to be seen. And to see the world for all of its possibilities, to accept the journeys that lead us to certain moments in life—to be the voyeur and the watched. As the fictional world of the Camp Miasma story collides with Kris and Billy’s existence, with Little Death (Jack Haven) threatening fleeting and absolute oblivion as their carnage becomes more comprehensible, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma careens into a narrative whirlwind.

Again, it’s all about the energy, and this is a film that strikes chords through feeling and overt emotion. To watch a film by Schoenbrun is to realize how much darker our hallways seem at midnight. Not because of the monsters that might lurk in it, but because of all that doesn’t. The impossibility of us is put into focus.

Schoenbrun, cinematographer Eric Yue, and a team of production designers craft an enticing tapestry of classic visual motifs. Utilizing the long-underused but forever impressive textured tool of matte shooting, the film builds a surrealist, fantastical world as the backdrop. While heads are being cut off and buckets of blood spilled, it’s all happening against these technicolor dreamscapes, brought to life through an artisan’s vivid eye.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma brings together classic motifs with striking modernity.

That dreamy aesthetic bolsters the more meditative sequences, and Kris’s first foray into Billy’s world feels, suitably, like Dorothy entering Oz. David Lynch’s Oz, at least. This feverish art style is so gorgeous, and the overarching, ephemeral story beats are so alluring that they make its greatest stumble easier to digest. Because while the narrative itself is engaging and Einbinder and Anderson’s longing chemistry make us care, the dialogue struggles to maintain the same weight.

For a story that’s meant to be a comedy, there are few laughs. Things are just a touch too abrupt or stilted when playing for humor. The flat, dry delivery doesn’t mesh well with the over-the-top grandeur of the surrounding visuals. The dissonance is likely the intent, but it doesn’t feel fully realized.

It’s more of an idea that works in theory but struggles in practice. A lot of the comedy comes from understanding of film as a medium, the bits and bolts. There’s the metatextual understanding of Kris’s uphill battle (and the absurd pretension of their first film) and the obnoxious Zoom calls she takes with the heads of studios. There’s also, of course, the specific tropes of slasher films such as who are the first targets to die.

Camp Miasma thrives in excess, be it in junk food, beheadings, or looks of longing. 

It’s best when it either focuses on the character reveals and the burgeoning steam in their dynamic or the craft of it all. There’s something so deliriously captivating and grotesquely beautiful in the montage where Little Death goes on their rampage, the choreography fluid yet almost robotic in movements. They’re  a character going through the paces of what society has deemed them to be—a monster given marching orders for the sake of the ravenous moviegoer looking for thrills in the unknown.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma revels in excess. A scene where Anderson’s Billy eats a slathered-up chicken wing is more obscene than the extreme close-up on Kris’s face as she reaches her petite mort. The way they belly up to a gluttonous amount of candy is more repulsive than the splatter of blood and gore. Everything and anything is meant to be devoured, whims met through fantasy and brushes with danger, reckoning found through bloodshed, sugar, and sex.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma casts a wicked spell of wanting. Playful yet haunting, aided by returning collaborator Alex G’s low-fi, experimental music, the film fortifies Jane Schoenbrun’s strengths as a filmmaker, challenging our desires and the ways we seek stories to delight, distract, and delude ourselves. The gorgeous landscapes and glass paintings heighten this bloody, meta-fairytale, finding a home in horror while challenging the origins of monsters and who gets to play the heroine.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is playing now in theaters everywhere.