Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so dense and smart and exhilarating that you need to watch it several times to decode all that writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is saying. There is, as the title spells out – sex and death at a camp – but there is also the history and politics of slasher films, sapphic love, how movies circumscribe and liberate us, the art of watching and the female orgasm – the serial killer in the film and in the film within the film is named Little Death, which in French is poetically called la petite mort, referring to orgasms. It’s a lot but Schoenbrun threads it together with wit, verve and tenderness. The beating heart of this film in which blood gushes several feet high when heads are removed from bodies, is actually the relationship between two women.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an upcoming director with indie-cred whom the studio hires to reboot a nearly dead slasher movie franchise. The genius opening credits take us through the journey of the film – the first called Camp Miasma was a blockbuster and then the formula was rinsed and repeated until it was rendered juice-less.
Kris wants her reboot to include the Final Girl from the first film – Billy played by a wickedly fierce Gillian Anderson. Kris travels to the middle of nowhere to meet the reclusive star who is doing her own version of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. What transpires is deliciously trippy and gory but somehow, also deeply romantic. I can’t recommend it enough.