Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Grade: B

Jane Schoenbrun’s movies have a tendency to follow me home. The experience doesn’t end at the theater. Their previous feature film, 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, had me driving home after the latest showing, as the roads were a ghost town and it was pushing midnight. Normally when a movie ends, I get out my phone and rejoin the outside world, catching up on the notifications I missed. I didn’t immediately do that, and didn’t realize it until I got home. That’ll keep you in the atmosphere.

Now, two years later, we have Schoenbrun’s follow-up: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The metaphor in Schoenbrun’s 2024 movie landed heavily with the trans community, helping some people recognize what’s often called an “egg crack” moment: the realization that they may be trans and becoming more comfortable with that possibility. By now, those eggs have been cracked, and people know whether they’re scrambled, over hard, or sunny side up. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is more about gayness/queerness.

The opening credits are fantastic, giving us exposition better than any dialogue could. We learn of the Camp Miasma franchise—a series of horror movies about a bullied teen who was drowned in the lake, and has spent several years and sequels coming back to take it out on annual unsuspecting campers. Billy Presley starred as the “final girl” for the first couple of installments, then retired from acting, and now lives a reclusive lifestyle on the property where the movies were filmed.

Enter 29-year-old Kris Williams, a filmmaker who has been given the green light to reboot and update the franchise, and travels to visit Billy at her home. Schoenbrun grew up watching The X-Files—and now, here they are, directing Agent Scully herself in a movie. Gillian Anderson plays Billy as an enigmatic Tennessee Williams character, or as she’s described, “Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard.” Hannah Einbinder gives a marvelous, star-making performance as Kris. She has to play so many different emotional registers and beats, and nails them all.

Schoenbrun brings their usual dark, otherworldly, sometimes disturbing images to the table. I liked the different filmmaking techniques that were called upon, such as a Zoom meeting which made me feel like I was on that call, watching the computer screen, with all the participants in rectangles off to the side, showing up in the center whenever they talked, with an occasional one-second blip where we’d lose a word. And when we see a significant chunk of the original Camp Miasma film, I momentarily forgot we were seeing a movie-within-a-movie. It’s constructed with enough meticulous care that the full version could have been its own standalone feature.

Watching Schoenbrun’s progress as they rise in the ranks reminds me of taking in Bo Burnham’s specials in real time as they were released. As Burnham grew in popularity, each Netflix special got a fancier and more elaborate production. In addition to Anderson, Schoenbrun was able to snag the likes of Eva Victor (writer/director/star of Sorry, Baby), Kevin McDonald (The Kids in the Hall), Patrick Fischler (Mulholland Drive), Dylan Baker, and Zach Cherry. Schoenbrun’s 1990s experiences are prevalent in their work, including an old familiar needle-drop from 1996 that underscores a killing spree.

Near the end, the plane seems to be landing into what feels like a natural ending for a movie, and I expected to see credits. But it’s not over. There’s an epilogue. You’ll have to just go with it, but by then, I’d gone with so much that came before, I became accustomed to not questioning what I saw.

My issue with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wasn’t that it posed too many questions. I Saw the TV Glow certainly didn’t explain everything, but with that one, I always felt Schoenbrun’s hand on the steering wheel, intentionally guiding us somewhere they knew we needed to go. I didn’t get that here. I wasn’t bothered by being lost; I just wasn’t always convinced there was anyone leading me.

Camp Miasma sometimes felt like a case of, “I just showed you a bunch of cool, weird imagery. Even I’m not sure what it all means. You figure it out.” And that’s a shame, because so much of what Schoenbrun puts on the screen is genuinely fascinating. I wanted to feel that same sense of purpose I felt with I Saw the TV Glow, where the ambiguity made me want to dig deeper rather than wonder whether there was anything deeper to dig into. One thing’s for sure: I will see anything Jane Schoenbrun does. They haven’t matched their previous film, but they absolutely haven’t lost my attention.

Grade: B