Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, as though workshopped by Eros, Thanatos, Colonel Sanders and the Jolly Rancher in the seediest recesses of a Blockbuster Video, Schoenbrun’s delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet.

There’s a vulnerability to being touched by something, to finding something sexy or scary, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is filled with a wry but immense compassion for its heroine and her habit of holding up concepts to ward off her own reactions.

What happens to these spaces when we feel comfortable in our bodies again? Does resurrection always have to require a type of death first? Is there ever a point in our lives where it’s too late to transform? That the film manages to make room for these ideas while lacing it all with enough tacky genre thrills to make it all palatable and thought-provoking is a miraculous feat in its own right.

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a joyous blast of a film about sex, desire, and death with a killer yet vulnerable performance by Hannah Einbinder.

You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it — body, brains, and all.

Overall, this is their most conventional film yet, and it further cements Schoebrun as one of the pre-eminent queer filmmakers of today, one who continues to bring clear vision and nuance to themes of identity, sex, and selfhood.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma sometimes gets tangled up in the rigging of its ideas, and the film blows off course more than once on its way to the ending. But its joyousness, tethered to its deep affection for movies that plenty of people would just call junk, is its guiding spirit.