Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review: Jane Schoenbrun Serves

If Jane Schoenbrun is feeling the pressures of being their generation’s highest-profile trans filmmaker, it shows in only the most enjoyably defiant of ways in Un Certain Regard opener “Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma.” A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, as though workshopped by Eros, Thanatos, Colonel Sanders and the Jolly Rancher in the seediest recesses of a Blockbuster Video, Schoenbrun’s delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet. Here, the director’s perennial questions around gender identity and identification are sublimated into a tribute to the slasher movie that also serves as an exploration of the frequently fucked-up nature of female desire and a manifesto for giving yourself the permission to feel it.

That writer-director Schoenbrun has also designed their movie as a delightfully meta in-joke on the Hollywood franchise machine, is evidenced by a terrifically overstuffed opening credits sequence. Designed by Mila Matveeva, it takes us through the history of the fictional “Camp Miasma” horror franchise, in which a spear-wielding, gender-fluid killer in a ceiling-vent helmet terrorizes the “young and nubile” visitors to a thickly forested lakeside summer camp. There’s a parade of VHS covers, marketing materials, merchandising tie-ins, declining box office reports, and inevitably, a flurry of blogs both detailing the series’ homophobia and transphobia, and attempting to reclaim it.

Meanwhile an interestingly synthy, anti-melodic cover of REM’s “Nightswimming” plays — the contrapuntal music cuts are a constant kitchy pleasure, never more so than when the original movie’s climactic orgy of bloodletting is accompanied by Counting Crows’ “Long December,” a needle-drop as endlessly amusing as it is pointedly anachronistic. The titles then close on an illustration of filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbender) the “Sundance wunderkind” who has been tapped to helm the franchise reboot, and just in case the parallel were not already clear (both of Schoenbrun’s previous features, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow” premiered to acclaim in Sundance), that’s when the director’s name appears. 

Kris is on her way to meet Billy Preston (played in the past by a tremulous Amanda Fix and in the now by a silky, scrumptious Gillian Anderson), the star of the original “Camp Miasma” movie. Billy refused to return for any of its increasingly derided sequels and now lives in semi-seclusion on the very site where the movie was shot. Both women reject the idea that this makes Billy some kind of “Norma Desmond from ‘Sunset Boulevard’” yet she does prove to have a fondness for turbans and for emerging dramatically from the shadows, heavily mascara-ed and ever-ready for her close-up.

Both Einbender, in her first feature after her Emmy-winning breakthrough on TV’s “Hacks,” and Anderson are on superb form here, though Anderson’s self-consciously iconic Billy gets the majority of the meme-able moments. Such as when, delivering the line like she’s licking it off her fingers, she turns to Kris proffering a tray laden with KFC and drawls in her unplaceable Southern accent “Do you like… dipping sauce?”

Anderson appears to be enjoying her foray into Sapphic high-camp tremendously, and the supporting cast is speckled with equally game performers, from Eva Victor’s punk DJ to Dylan Baker’s insufferable studio exec, to Kris’ lover Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her dopey hookup Thor (Aren Buchholz). But then everyone here, in front of and behind the camera looks to be having a great time, which keeps the mood bouncy, however gory or splattery or thematically knotty the moment.

Production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland are let off the chain with a succession of stylized interiors and lurid, artificial backdrops where painted snow sits heavy on fir branches beneath a peachy purple twilight sky. The very sun and moon themselves seem to emanate exclusively the bluish-pinky palette of colors recently dubbed “bisexual lighting” and while Alex G’s 80s-influenced score swirls in the background, cinematographer Eric K. Yue has fun experimenting with other visual homages to slasher tradition. There are crash zooms and shaky P.O.V.-cams, recurring eyeball motifs and split diopters, which even Kris gets excited about, pointing and breathing with awe “Split diopter!”

Kris is, after all, a movie dork, who cannot stop intellectualizing the things she loves and the sometimes unsavory reasons she loves them, long enough to be able to make them, just as her key sexual issue turns out to be an inability to fully surrender herself to the fantasies that embarrass her but that might just get her off. In the second half — which uses the silliness of slasher convention to get to some fairly profound places — the theme of sexual confusion and erotic dysfunction, particularly as experienced by women, emerges from behind the spouting fountains of blood spurting from the neckholes of various decapitated unfortunates, as the film’s most moving throughline.

But what can an actress in her fifties and a filmmaker twenty years her junior have to teach each other? At first the central duo’s intergenerational incomprehension is played for laughs. “What’s poly?” asks Billy, and Kris must eventually concede that yes, it kind of is like cheating only “with game nights where you have to hang out with bisexual guys named Thor.” But as their connection grows, the movie cuts closer to the emotional bone. After one fumbled encounter, Kris curls up into herself in shame and whispers “I’m just so bad at sex”; later Billy tells of losing her virginity and finding “it was exactly as bad as I had always imagined it would be.” Having bonded over this unusually frank confession of female sexual inadequacy, gradually, the older, more worldly woman inducts the younger, less secure one into the arcane acceptance of her own desire.

And so this love story between generationally different worldviews that are usually believed to be incompatible gets to portray this burgeoning relationship as a fantasy safe harbor, garlanded with Raisinettes and popcorn, in which neither will be judged for the misogyny, transphobia or other real-world problematics of what turns them on. It is Kris’s stated aim, echoing with the failures of a hundred indie filmmakers gone before, that she’s going “to beat Hollywood at its own game.” Perhaps, in smuggling trans allegories, voyeur theory, kink-positive feminism and transgressive fantasy roleplay into the candy wrapper of a movie about remaking a movie about a deranged serial murderer with a box on his head, Jane Schoenbrun has done just that.