Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Cert: 15A
Genre: Horror-Comedy
Starring: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler
Running Time: 1 hr 48 mins
What makes Jane Schoenbrun’s oeuvre compelling also makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma a little frustrating. Few contemporary film-makers have such an intensely personal relationship with the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture. Forget content. For Schoenbrun, cinema, the internet and TV are formative encounters, psychic happenings, erotic pleasures and all the attendant hang-ups that come with innermost thoughts.
In this third feature that fixation produces some extraordinary flights of fancy and, sometimes, a film that feels like competing movies, an academic lecture and a rival jumble sale all fighting for your love.
The wonderful Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young, high-minded film-maker given the chance to revive the long-dormant Camp Miasma slasher series. Her obsession with the franchise is inseparable from its most notorious image: the heroine, played by Gillian Anderson’s reclusive Billy, being killed while having an orgasm.
So Kris ventures into a wilderness (picture Camp Crystal Lake in Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg) to persuade the reclusive Billy to return as the franchise’s final girl. The encounter sets off a hallucinogenic cascade of images touching on fanship and desire, and – a central borrowing from French – big death and little death.
Schoenbrun has fun rummaging through the slasher flick, with degraded videotapes, lurid colours, cheap-looking effects and winkingly tacky music. In Camp Miasma these diversions flag how the trashiest movie can become a sacred text if encountered as a teen. Kris provides the academic footnotes: how horror teaches its young spectators to understand sex, danger and gender, and how easily the viewer’s vicarious desires can become indistinguishable from the wants of their avatar.
[ Jane Schoenbrun: ‘It’s obvious why Gen Z isn’t having sex’Opens in new window ]
The director, embracing maximalist mode, keeps adding. There is Hollywood satire, queer deconstruction, franchise culture, pastiche, desire and a rumbling argument about the meaning of the slasher. The results are frequently fascinating but cluttered, a pile-up where the earlier films allowed mystery and mood to percolate.
Anderson has a ball, channelling Gloria Swanson, but the supposedly erotic conceit is too knowing and comical to blaze up the screen. The script is obsessed with the orgasm as a nexus of pleasure and annihilation, but that idea, ironically, is less sexy than the film’s fixation with sweets. (We’ve never seen so many Jolly Ranchers.)
Even when Schoenbrun gets bogged down, their imagination remains exhilarating. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the film-maker’s narratively least satisfying film, but its restless reckoning with how horror movies work is seldom dull.
In cinemas from Friday, August 21st, with previews on Wednesday, August 19th