“Free David Ehrlich.” These words from Jane Schoenbrun’s Twitter account became a calling card of the first days at Cannes after the IndieWire Chief Film Critic’s joke-laden Letterboxd review was misinterpreted as a “horny jail” criminal offense. After a brief incarceration, he was promptly exonerated by the director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma themselves with the cheeky phrase. Schoenbrun’s response is a social media gag fit for the absurdist drama of the Cannes Film Festival, and a strangely perfect case study that encapsulates their artistic wavelength as a filmmaker deeply attuned to the chaotic and intense ways people internalize and retransmit the media signals that surround us.
Following the breakout success of their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was announced to be the Opening Night premiere of Un Certain Regard, a prestigious pedestal for a storyteller also set to release their debut novel, “Public Access Afterworld,” later this year. First described in 2024 as Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel, the mere suggestion of that eccentric conceit was dangerously arousing. The fact that Schoenbrun pulls it off is all the more impressive.
Following up back-to-back Sundance sensations was never going to be easy, but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma carves out its own identity as Schoenbrun’s most playful and expansive excavation of media, sexuality, and self-discovery. If We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) explored the internet as a dissociative mirror, and I Saw the TV Glow examined television nostalgia as a portal into repressed identity, Camp Miasma pushes those ideas to the brink of maximalist genre study in something messier, funnier, and even more vulnerable.
The film opens with a montage chronicling “Camp Miasma” lore, establishing the internal mythology of a niche-beloved cult-classic slasher franchise with imagery of tie-in board games, Razzie Awards, tabloid headlines, and academic exposés on the transphobia ingrained in the films. With one swift gesture, the worldbuilding behind Camp Miasma is already lived-in and rich with texture while introducing Kris (Hannah Einbinder) as a wunderkind queer director and Sundance breakout (the first of many autobiographical beats employed by Schoenbrun) tapped with reviving the dormant franchise as a studio project.
Kris heads off to meet with the original film’s “final girl,” Billy (Gillian Anderson), now a reclusive Norma Desmond-like mystery figure removed from the public eye who chose to give up acting and refused to return to Camp Miasma sequels despite the many offers. After arriving at the remote coordinates provided, revealed to be the abandoned set of the original film itself, Schoenbrun’s playground of cinematic innovation launches fully into orbit.
Bursting at the seams with fantastical creativity, we witness explosive blood geysers, orgasmic awakenings, and lush matte painting dreamscapes. While this doesn’t necessarily achieve the same level of emotional interiority as I Saw the TV Glow, its strength is in its maximalist, multilayered identity. The charged intimacy between the fledgling breakout director and long-forgotten child star is first shaped by their extensive conversations on Kris’s concept for Camp Miasma’s origin story, but what Billy is most interested in is who Kris is below the academic sales pitch. Slowly but surely, the atmosphere shifts toward the ecstasy of sexual discovery, defining what is all at once a self-referential intervention on studio reboot culture, a riveting standalone slasher “movie within a movie” featuring a killer (Little Death played by Jack Haven) with a pseudo-TV set head, and a love letter to the characters we allow to shape us.
In whichever context you prefer to consume Camp Miasma’s multifaceted psychosexual enterprises, it’s always a hypnotic spectacle. The lattermost layer, however, is where Schoenbrun separates themself from the average modern storyteller. One of the foremost preoccupations of their career is the dissection of the body as a vessel that absorbs stories, images, and fantasies until they begin to alter the architecture of our identities. In essence, we are the media we consume. It is embedded so deeply in our bones that we are not just chemically altered by it; we inhabit it, and it inhabits us. It’s rooted in Schoenbrun’s lived experience as a trans person, and examined through Kris’s relationship to the Camp Miasma films in her attempt to revive the classic franchise. Schoenbrun, and by proxy Billy and Kris, understand the weird, unspoken intimacy of growing up shaped by fictional worlds that you know better than the people around you.
Our fictional fantasies are inseparable from the flesh that carries them. For Kris, to watch, fantasize, and project herself into the film she aims to create is an act of self-discovery. For Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an ambidextrous experiment into what they seemingly have the singular capacity to visualize: obsessing over media is also an urge to merge with it completely.
Little Death is not just a slasher villain on a screen; it’s a part of Kris’s DNA, psychologically, sexually, and spiritually. The character is part of the language in which she starts to understand herself. Billy recognizes she shares the same condition, though for her, it has been filtered through decades of repression and retreat. The truth of their connection, and the most profound statement of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, emerges from that shared reality that an unavoidable condition of modern existence is inheriting our truest selves through the images that seduce us.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Credit to Mubi via Film Affinity