Three films into this career, it's become apparent that the work of the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun transmits on unusually particularised frequencies: one cinemagoer might vibe with a film that completely bypasses the person sitting next to them, while keen admirers of the previous emission might be left indifferent or flummoxed by the next. Adding to this sense of a narrowband cinema is this oeuvre's fascination with marginal or culturally disreputable reference points. After an online RPG game in 2021's We're All Going to the World's Fair and the cult teen serial at the centre of 2024's I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun's latest Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes as its backdrop an overextended slasher franchise. Behind its opening credits, we're afforded a potted history of this Friday the 13th-like enterprise: boffo early Eighties box office, tie-in toys and other assorted memorabilia, sluggish sequels, increasingly scathing reviews, slow financial death, then online reappropriation by Gen Z, and news of the kind of high-profile reboot Schoenbrun themselves may have been approached to direct once I Saw the TV Glow became a minor phenomenon. On screen, the reboot has been assigned to Sundance-lauded wunderkind Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) whose preparation involves driving out to a snowy woodland middle-of-nowhere to meet with the first movie's leading lady. The now-eccentric and reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) has had the film's summer camp set converted into an inhabitable property; somewhat unnervingly, given fairytale lore, this wooden cabin has been stocked high with candy of various stripes. In a straightahead horror movie, it'd be a natural site of carnage, overrun by the ghosts of the past. Here, though, it also serves as something of a getaway, a place where an uptight creative can maybe begin to work through some of her issues. Schoenbrun intends to give us the best of both worlds: the transgressive thrills and pleasures of the slasher film, with a thick toplayer of meta commentary on same. What we actually get, I think, is a mishmash, and a script that could have done with one or two more passes that buzzy directors sometimes don't have (or have the time) to make.
On the plus side, here is what may end up being 2026's pre-eminent example of a deeply personal - even confessional - American cinema. It's not inconceivable that Einbinder, donning specs and babbling even more than she did on TV's Hacks, is doing (and has been coached to do) an impersonation of her director: nervy, nerdy, a peeper, a poker and a pryer, Kris comes this way clinging anxiously to bifurcating pronouns, presenting as a curious soul in multiple senses. If I Saw the TV Glow was a fan's film, bound up in the complications of modern fandom, this is demonstrably the work of an acclaimed writer-director mulling over the industry they now find themselves welcomed into - its own fairytale kingdom, simultaneously beckoning and terrifying, rife with possibilities both candycoated and bloodcurdling. (It feels odd to compare a figure as non-binary as Schoenbrun to Eminem, that millennial voice of straight male rage, but Camp Miasma has something of the latter's difficult post-breakout albums, when he abandoned the cartoon rap that made him famous in favour of writing - and grousing - about his newfound circumstances.) Within the cabin, Kris and Billy effectively hold a two-person symposium, reflecting on the unwoke, transphobic terrors of the original Camp Miasmas, and whether or not the reboot should embrace its roots or radically course-correct. The most potent sequence sees us watching our heroines rewatching the franchise's first instalment (in which the younger Billy had an uncomfortable sex scene), an exposing hall-of-mirrors conceit that allows Schoenbrun to evoke what it is to sit close to others as an especially fraught strip of celluloid unspools before us. Am I supposed to be watching this? Am I allowed to enjoy it? What will this other person think of me when the lights come up? This line of inquiry may account for one early, jarring Weinstein allusion (seemingly toned down on the advice of someone's lawyers): Schoenbrun is all too aware of the traumas the cinema can trigger. I'm not sure the film's proposed corrective - getting fingered by your prospective leading lady on a rug scattered with Twixes - would be any easier to navigate from an HR (or a dry cleaning) perspective, but at least everything's now consensual. Yet at some point Camp Miasma segues from film analysis into self-analysis, and here's where Schoenbrun risks losing anyone who isn't Jane Schoenbrun.
Though the recent horror renaissance has underlined this genre can be whatever you make of it, I fear those drawn here by that knowingly lurid title will be among the first to tune out: they will surely want their carnage less winking and with far fewer footnotes. It's a positive that this fugue-like narrative fits no pre-existing template; I genuinely had no idea where these characters were headed or how events were going to pan out. It's a problem, though, that the second half tumbles down what feels like the wrong rabbithole, landing us among half-digested, half-regurgitated ideas and images, in the realms of a deadly self-absorption. Schoenbrun's going for Lynchian dream horror - the first half gets a lot out of scenes that end with the editorial equivalent of unresolved chords, allowing an image or an attached feeling to linger - but the effect gets undercut by this director's need to explain themselves at every turn. It's Kris writing "DESIRE" in a notebook upon first revisiting Camp Miasma on a gas-station DVD; in some way, the film never gets over the decision to name its thrusting, shapeshifting killer Little Death. Even as it opened itself up to viewer interpretation, I Saw the TV Glow retained vast, alluring pockets of mystery, something ineffable, quietly unsettling. Camp Miasma is, ultimately, as upfront as a lonelyhearts ad: the tale of an inexperienced lover who just needs the right woman to bring her to orgasm and thereby rescue her from the tyrannies of polyamory. Even by the leftfield standards of the Schoenbrun filmography, it's perilously niche. On a scene-by-scene basis, there are consolations. Einbinder is very game, and Anderson is terrific as a sort of Dolly Parton in exile, at once sorceress and survivor, a pansexual fantasy figure, and the basis of Hallowe'en 2026's #1 outfit for hipsters. Schoenbrun surrounds them with choice, funny little freaks: Kids in the Hall's Kevin McDonald as an actor-turned-hotelier, Patrick Fischler (the guy who went behind the dumpster in Mulholland Dr.) as an ominous shopkeeper, Dylan Baker offering an unexpected Austin Powers impersonation via Zoom. Give Schoenbrun this: these three films have redefined what we think of as personal cinema. What was previously the domain of hyper-confident, hyper-loud straight men now embraces a trans nerd communicating awkwardly at a frequency not everyone in the room is automatically set to receive. A dial has shifted somewhere in the cosmos, even if the signal has occasional cause to fluctuate.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now showing in selected cinemas.
