Critic Reviews

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.

It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched.

It's an endlessly engaging and often very funny film equipped with arresting imagery, gorgeous design (including some beautiful matte paintings) and no shortage of gleeful gore. Or to put it another way, this is another instant cult classic from Schoenbrun, and it's already fascinating to ponder what they might do next.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire. Still, on a deeper level, in a hole at the bottom of its lake, is a hard-won sexual awakening.

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.

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

Lavish with cultural references and fresh imagination, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is a revelry of comedy, murder, intellectualism, sexual awakening, queerness, and more.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it: happily it does so within three minutes.

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.