Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

(dir. Jane Schoenbrun)

By: Adam Freed

Leave it to Jane Shoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) to transition one of the least cerebral genres of film, the slasher, into a deeply thought provoking, thematically layered atomic bomb of a film.  Not only is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma an ambitious leap forward for the gifted filmmaker, it is also one of the most thoughtful explorations of the invisible bond between personal genre obsession and the human psyche ever captured on film.  To simply “watch” Shoenbrun’s work at this point reeks of impossibility.  The eerie surrealism and deeply allegorical nature of the filmmaker’s art is something in which audiences must marinate to absorb the full potency of its nostalgic intent.  This is certainly the case for Camp Miasma, a film about an indelible early 80’s-era slasher film that spurned generations of sequels and the promising filmmaker tasked with ushering in its theatrical return after a long fatigue-based dormancy.

To call Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma a metatextual film about making a movie, is an oversight that may become easy for broad audiences to make due to the intentionally tropish way with which Schoenbrun wields the use of stylized violence and minimalistic production design.  Yet deep beneath its slasher-coded facade is a deeply personal exploration of sexuality and the way that outside influence has long posed deliberate barriers to the pursuit of physical intimacy and one’s pursuit of sexual satisfaction.  For the complexity of a Jane Shoenbrun film to land its punches, it must be delivered with the patience and fragility that its characters demand.  To this end, Camp Miasma is a performance masterclass by costars Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, The Great) and Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), both of whom inject into their characters the precise alchemy of fractured identity and erotic appetite to act as the driving force of Shoenbrun’s intent.

On its surface, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a film about a horror-franchise obsessed director named Kris (Einbinder) on the brink of a career defining opportunity to reanimate a long-dormant slasher franchise through a meeting with the actress Billy (Anderson) who became its famous final girl decades prior.  Their shared inability to shake the hold that the original Camp Miasma film, and its murderous antagonist, “Little Death”, holds over them says a great deal more about their shared experiences and sexual proclivities than it does about the genre itself.  As evidence of the sexual innuendo boiling to the surface of Shoenbrun’s work is the fact that the phrase “la petit mort” or “little death” is a French euphemism for the female orgasm.  While this may be one of the film’s more obvious choices, it speaks to the rich experience of basking in Jane Shoenbrun’s divinely layered and infinitely watchable Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Target Score 9/10 - Following the critical acclaim that surrounded I Saw the TV Glow (2024), auteur director Jane Shoenbrun returns with a film elevated in its ambition and execution. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as unmistakable as the works of David Lynch, and quite possibly as influential.