Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is wall-to-wall “WTF?!”—and I couldn’t be happier. In a summer that has had a lot of humdrum offerings, this strange, beautiful and bizarre concoction qualifies as a nice level set.
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s film is at once an ode to ’80s slasher films, a satire of the same thing and, somehow, an autobiographical depiction of sexual awakening and gender transformation via a slasher-killer narrative. I, for one, never thought I would see a film that attempted to do all of these things at once. But it now exists, and I’m quite happy that I’ve witnessed it.
Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming director, is hired to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise—a film series clearly inspired by Friday the 13th—decades after its 1980s birth. Kris looks to cast Billy (Gillian Anderson), star of the original installment, at the center, much to the chagrin of her producers. Kris seeks out Billy, who has been living a reclusive life at the abandoned sleepaway camp that acted as the setting for the original film.
The slasher killer at the center of Camp Miasma is Little Death (Jack Haven), who, like the infamous Jason, was drowned in a lake and seeks revenge on any campers hanging around. Before their demise, Little Death was taunted by fellow campers for believing they were both a boy and a girl, living different lives on different days of the week. When Little Death re-emerges, the killer is wearing a plastic suit with a giant air vent for its head. This is, without question, one of the oddest-looking slasher killers in cinema history.
Schoenbrun drifts in and out of standard narrative storytelling as the lines between make-believe and reality not only blur, but completely disappear. Other dreamscape/meta films are referenced, including Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and the films of David Lynch through the casting of Mulholland Drive’s Patrick Fischler.
Everything that transpires as Kris and Billy get to know each other is beautifully shot, wonderfully scripted, and superbly acted by Anderson and Einbinder. It’s also just plain nuts. There are sequences in this film that are unlike anything you have seen in a movie before, and it would be criminal to give the details away. When I saw them, I had no idea they were coming, and I was completely transfixed.
The film has its share of gory shocks and is profound, very funny and very surprising, given the slasher-film premise. Again, to describe any of the gore effects would be to give away some of the film’s greater sequences. I can tell you that the approach had me laughing hard within the first five minutes.
Schoenbrun has made no secret that this film is a depiction of their personal slasher-movie fandom combined with their own remembrance of sexual awakening and personal gender identity. (They also really like Sweet Tarts.) It’s clear that Schoenbrun is ingenious at bringing all of these feelings to a screen story. Oh, the things that are going on inside that head!
There will certainly be that part of the moviegoing population that watches Miasma and dismisses it with a loud, “What the shit?!” It’s not a movie with a distinctive path laid out for the viewer.
It is a movie that goes straight to the heart of someone’s most intimate thoughts and dreams, and puts them right up there on the screen. David Lynch is gone, but his spirit lives on with filmmakers like Schoenbrun.
Up next, for Schoenbrun: An adaptation of the graphic novel Black Hole for Netflix. I can say with great confidence that this is something to look forward to.
