A series that had been quiet for years gets a second chance and new life in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” and it’s the best film Jane Schoenbrun has made.
Schoenbrun writes and directs, and the setup is a gift: the Camp Miasma slasher series, long quiet, is handed to a young, eager director for a fresh start. That director is Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder with the right mix of drive and doubt. When Kris finds Billy, the guarded star of the original film, played by Gillian Anderson, the movie stops being a comedy about bringing back old franchises and turns into something stranger. Amanda Fix plays Billy in her younger years, in scenes set apart from the present, and the pairing of Fix and Anderson is where the film finds its truest force.
Blood, Desire, and No Apology
The film makes a plain promise, and it delivers on every part of it. Kris and Billy do not just talk shop about the old picture — they fall into each other, and the movie follows them into a confusion of desire, fear, and delirium that never plays as a cover for something else. This is a horror-comedy-romance that will not settle on one mood, and it works because Schoenbrun trusts all three equally.
Arthur Conti and Zach Cherry round out the cast as Alex and Will, and Eva Victor appears as DJ Ella Giastic, a small but pointed addition to a film already taking many risks. None of it feels like too much. Every performer here plays a movie that is at once a slasher, a satire of slasher franchises, and an honest same-sex love story, and they hold all three tones at once without excess flourish.
“one of Jane Schoenbrun’s most accomplished and personal works”
That line holds true. It is light on its feet even when it cuts deep, and it cuts deep even when it is tender.
Why This Story Suits This Director
Schoenbrun has built a body of work around identity slipping loose from the body it lives in, and a story about a young woman hired to bring back a dead franchise, who then falls for the original star, fits that habit exactly. The film knows it is looking at itself — Kris is hired to bring a dead thing back, and instead she brings her own desire back to life — and there are moments where that framing pushes too hard. But even then, the film never loses its honesty. It is filled with longing, with humor, with tenderness, sometimes within the very same scene.
Here is what keeps the film standing where a weaker genre picture would fall apart:
- The casting of Anderson and Fix as one woman across two points in her life, which turns a device into real feeling.
- Einbinder’s work, which never lets Kris’s drive and her private trouble feel like two separate stories.
- Schoenbrun’s refusal to let the horror go soft just because the romance is carrying most of the weight.
- A bold way of shooting the film, showing Schoenbrun’s cast in a moment of full feeling and abandon, turning what could have stayed a plain slasher copy into something richer.
The camera does not merely watch Kris and Billy come apart and come together. It stays close, and it does not look away.
This is a film about an old franchise near its end and a personal change that makes both feel dangerous again. It is full of desire, dread, and humor, and it moves the viewer often within the same scene. Schoenbrun’s habit of studying its own construction eases its hold at moments, but that cost is small against everything the film gets right: a slasher picture that has something real to say about desire, about what came before, and about what it costs to bring something dead back into the light.
Score: 89 out of 100.
