The filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s last film, the eerie and sad I Saw the TV Glow, used a made-up artifact from the pop-culture past — a cultishly beloved supernatural television show — as a kind of seeing stone, gazing through its lens to inspect matters of identity. Schoenbrun draws from the next well over in their new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which employs a fictional slasher movie of yesteryear as the portal into a conversation about self and desire. It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an up-and-coming filmmaker who has parlayed Sundance success into a gig rebooting a once-popular horror franchise called Camp Miasma. The original film was a watershed smash hit, spawning myriad sequels and merchandise and intense fan adoration of its killer, Little Death, who was once a gender fluid teenager bullied to death by his fellow campers. Kris, long a devotee of the franchise, is determined to cast the reclusive star of the first film, a mostly forgotten actress named Billy (Gillian Anderson, drawling away like she’s still doing Streetcar). A journey to Billy’s house — a remote cabin near the Washington/British Columbia border — leads Kris on a curious, blood-spattered journey of discovery.
