TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA Review

We have been watching Jane Schoenbrun come into themselves across three films now, and it has been one of the genuinely thrilling things to witness in contemporary American cinema. We're All Going to the World's Fair was a coming out, tender and strange and made from the inside of a particular kind of loneliness. I Saw the TV Glow was a wound, one of the most viscerally upsetting films about gender dysphoria we have ever seen, wearing its metaphor like armor. And now, at the end of our sixth film of day two at Cannes, running on caffeine and the particular stubborn love of cinema that keeps us in these seats long after our bodies have asked us to stop, comes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Which is, of all things. a film about pleasure. About giving in. About finally, after all that pain and all that work, just letting yourself feel something good.

We were not prepared for how much we needed that.

Schoenbrun has made a film about a woman who has spent her whole life watching the movie of herself rather than living in it. The film itself refuses to make the same mistake.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a 29-year-old filmmaker hired to direct a woke reboot of a transphobic eighties slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, whose central villain is a ghost called Little Death. The double meaning is the point and Schoenbrun leans into it with a wink that never tips into smugness. Kris is bookish and queer and slightly stunted, a person who has spent so long intellectualizing experience that the experience itself has become theoretical. She lives inside her head the way some people live inside their houses, rarely opening the windows.

And then Gillian Anderson walks in and opens all of them at once.

Anderson plays Billy Presley, the original franchise's final girl, who has spent the years since declining sequels and living alone on the actual campground where the film was shot. She is styled as a Norma Desmond figure but with something Norma never had: genuine peace, genuine settledness, a woman who has made her choices and is not tormented by them. Her entrance is one of the great screen arrivals of this Cannes, all fedora and velvet and a a husky Southern accent that makes every sentence sound like a proposition. Schoenbrun, a devoted X-Files fan, has cast their dream and the dream delivers completely.

The film around these two performers is dense and layered and deliberately, joyfully excessive. There is a slasher movie within the movie. There is a Counting Crows song deployed during a killing spree. There is a full David Lynch meltdown during a Zoom call with studio executives that is the funniest and sharpest thing we have seen at this festival. There is Alex G on the soundtrack, and REM's "Nightswimming" whispered over the end credits, and cinematography by Eric Yue that makes everything fell like something you watched furtively in a friend's basement at age thirteen and never quite recovered from.

Is it accessible? Not entirely. Schoenbrun's films never are, and this one is denser than it sometimes acknowledges. There are moments in the second half where the layers accumulate past the point of comfortable navigation. But the film's argument, its central insistence, cuts through all of it cleanly: pleasure is not a concept to be over-intellectualized. It is something you can actually feel in your body. Stop watching the movie of yourself. Get in it.

There is absolutely no one else alive who could have made a film that looks and feels like this one. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

We have watched Schoenbrun make films about dysphoria and disconnection and the ache of not fitting inside your own skin. This is the film they made after fitting. It is looser and warmer and stranger and funnier than anything that came before it, and it carries the particular lightness of someone who has come through something difficult and is now, cautiously, letting themselves enjoy being on the other side.

We walked out of our sixth film of the day into the Cannes night feeling something we had not felt since Nagi Notes earlier: genuinely moved. Not by grief this time. By joy, which is harder to earn and rarer to find.

Day two ends well. We are grateful.

🍿 SCORE = 84/100