It was an unexpected turn of events after seeing Jane Schoenbrun’s buzzy third feature “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” Suddenly, after nearly 30 years of not thinking about the Counting Crows, their 1996 ballad “A Long December” was firmly stuck in my head, and it wouldn’t go away.
The film itself, a playful pastiche of shlocky, problematic slasher films, and send up of the pressure to create within the confines of Hollywood reboot culture, had not left me especially transported. It seemed, at first, like something that had been made expressly for film snobs and critics, the kind that flatters insider knowledge, niche fandoms and unabashed love of bad movies, a self-consciously styled cult classic in the making. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that song, and the strangely sublime sequence that accompanies it. “A Long December” was so ubiquitous when I was around 12 and 13 that it barely even registered as something to be moved by. I had no warm nostalgia for it; It was a song that I knew simply because it was there.
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And yet in the context of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a movie that I wasn’t even sure I liked very much at the time, in which it accompanies a pivotal and profound moment of carnage and catharsis, I fell in love with it. For weeks, it’s been playing on repeat in my head. This might seem like a weirdly small detail to focus on, but it was my truthful entry point to reconsidering a movie that is so personal to its filmmaker that it’s difficult to know how to even approach a review.
Schoenbrun is the most high-profile trans director working now and much of the heartbreak, horror and humor of that is embedded in “Camp Miasma,” in which Hannah Einbinder plays Kris a “Sundance wunderkind” director who has been hired to reboot a 1980s horror franchise and wants to recruit the original final girl Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) for the project.
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Kris is very much a Schoenbrun stand-in, from the fact of being Sundance breakouts down to the styling and the glasses. There is a cruel irony in the fact that Kris, who is queer, has been handed the keys to the fictional “Camp Miasma” series which are famously transphobic. The killer, called Little Death (Jack Haven), is a trans kid who was murdered and who rises out of the lake to slaughter unsuspecting campers. But Kris has always been drawn to the franchise, despite and maybe because of its problematic nature; It might have been bad for her, but it was formative nonetheless, like the big brand candies she’s always buying at gas stations.
And Kris is on a mission to find Billy, the wide-eyed star of the original film (Amanda Fix as young Billy), who retreated from acting and now lives a solitary, reclusive life at the camp where the movie was shot. Anderson plays the older Billy as a kind of “it’s the pictures that got small” Norma Desmond-type, swanning around in bejeweled turbans, silky robes and furs and speaking in a dramatic southern/mid-Atlantic accent that, while incongruous with the idea of a one-time final girl, is enjoyable for its heightened camp, nonetheless. In reality Billy has faded into a footnote; Kris’ agent (a funny Sarah Sherman) barely knows who she is.
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But nothing is quite real or especially believable in “Camp Miasma,” it’s more of a collection of feelings, tropes, styles, ideas and actors that Schoenbrun evidently loves, from Patrick Fischler, as a foreboding convenience store employee, and Dylan Baker, as a blustering Hollywood executive, to Eva Victor and Zach Cherry as some of the ill-fated camp counselors in the movie-within-the-movie who spend some of their last moments ecstatically dancing to Sally Shapiro. At a certain point you may be surprised to find that you’re fully watching a large portion of the original “Camp Miasma” along with Kris and Billy before both anti-realities bleed together to form a wild climax. This is a movie that is ultimately about sex, titillation and orgasm, after all. Even the killer’s name, Little Death, is a nod to the French expression.
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What it’s not really is a grisly slasher; The murders are cartoonish, with blood spurting out of victims’ necks like a geyser. Instead, it’s a thoughtfully constructed fever dream that wears its high and low brow references on its sleeve — a bold and worthy vision that continues Schoenbrun’s exploration of transitioning using the cinematic and pop cultural tools at their disposal and reinventing them in their image.
Now, excuse me, I must go listen to “A Long December” again.
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“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a Mubi release in limited release Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “bloody violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language.” Running time: 106 minutes. Three stars out of four.
