{"id":959022,"date":"2026-05-14T10:04:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T10:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/959022\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T10:04:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T10:04:13","slug":"teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-review-gillian-anderson-superb-in-queer-slasher-spectacular-cannes-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/959022\/","title":{"rendered":"Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review \u2013 Gillian Anderson superb in queer slasher spectacular | Cannes film festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink. As before with Schoenbrun\u2019s films, I found myself thinking of Gore Vidal\u2019s (still unfashionable) Myra Breckinridge novel.<\/p>\n

This is a film that somehow persuades you that the 80s slasher genre is an exalting and liberatingly progressive experience. As before, in her We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair<\/a> (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow<\/a> (2024), Schoenbrun pulls off the trick of inventing an imaginary media phenomenon and treating it with complete fan-seriousness \u2013 an online horror game and cult scary TV show in the first two films and now a slasher movie franchise called Camp Miasma about a teen transgender killer called Little Death wearing a ceiling vent as a mask (why is never explained) who periodically emerges from a lake in a sleepaway camp where scantily clad young people will be brutally speared.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The opening credits wittily walk us through the franchise\u2019s initial wild success and slump in the later movies, the merch and the video games and the insufferable cultural studies discourse about its \u201cproblematic\u201d treatment of gender. Now young indie film-maker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to direct a lucrative origin-story reboot of Camp Miasma, a dream job as she has been obsessed with this series since illicitly watching the first movie at the age of eight, thrilled by feelings she still can\u2019t understand by the Final Girl\u2019s mortal jeopardy, preparing to die while somehow experiencing the killer\u2019s point-of-view: feelings that Kris\u2019s unhappy, painful experiences with sex have never equalled.<\/p>\n

Now she has to persuade that iconic Final Girl from the first film to be in it \u2013 the star who quit after that and never acted in any subsequent episode or any film at all, a recluse like Norma Desmond or a very self-possessed Shelley Duvall. She is Billy Presley, a worldly connoisseur of junk food, snacks and sex fantasy, played with droll style and soign\u00e9e sexiness by Gillian Anderson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kris has to visit Billy in person to make her pitch and is disconcerted to discover that she actually lives in the remote disused sleepaway camp that was used as a location for the first film, in which she has built a mini screening room for repeatedly watching a 35mm print of her film. Billy\u2019s elegant, seductive manner disturbs and yet excites poor Kris.<\/p>\n

As for Billy, she is amused at Kris\u2019s earnest description of her queer polyamory but baffled and irritated when Kris invokes Judith Butler in talking about her plans to reclaim Camp Miasma. When they sit down to watch the film together, Billy indulges Kris\u2019s excitable comments on a great \u201csplit diopter\u201d shot \u2013 foreground and background faces in equal dreamlike sharp focus as in Brian de Palma\u2019s Carrie \u2013 and in fact Schoenbrun gives us a split diopter shot of her own at the end.<\/p>\n

But Billy has something terrible or wonderful to reveal about shooting the virginity loss scene in Camp Miasma and Kris becomes convinced that the two of them are not alone in this camp. Billy is secretly talking to someone. Could that someone be living at the bottom of the lake? Is the slasher in the square ceiling vent mask the equivalent of Erich von Stroheim\u2019s butler in Sunset Boulevard? Is Camp Miasma \u2026 gulp \u2026 real?<\/p>\n

Well, perhaps the point is that it\u2019s real in the sense that liberating, escapist fantasy is real \u2013 real in the way that boring reality isn\u2019t real. Or perhaps the reality resides in collapsing the distinction between real and unreal. Camp Miasma is strange and eccentric, but carried off with commitment and even passion.<\/p>\n

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":959023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-959022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116572367747888126","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/959023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}