Cannes Film Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Actress Gillian Anderson made her Paris Fashion Week debut earlier this year when she walked in the Miu Miu show in March. The gorgeous 57-year-old is part of a welcome trend in fashion right now: models over 25 being featured on the runway. Anderon’s Paris foray wouldn’t be the last time she came to France this year. She’s here at the Cannes Film Festival with her latest project, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.  

 

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A slasher film at Cannes is rare enough on its own, but a slasher film that’s also a comedy and a romance and an out-there fantasy world? That’s something to write home about; that’s something to talk about. Director Jane Schoenbrun’s newest film stars Hacks actress Hannah Einbinder and Anderson, and it is already creating a lot of buzz at Cannes, where it had its premiere during the first week of the fest.  

 

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After exiting the film screening – a press screening which ended in whoops and applause – I immediately sent a message to my cinephile friend and fellow film journalist, David Rong, in Beijing. “You have to see this movie,” I wrote. He replied, “Another friend just messaged me about it, too.” This is the value and beauty of the Cannes Film Festival for unusual, interesting films – the building of buzz, word-of-mouth, and early positive reviews.  

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an exploration of the horror genre, and it’s a love story, and a psychosexual exploration of desire. This is no ordinary movie. In fact, in all my years coming to Cannes (this marks year eight), I’ve never seen anything quite like it. (Though parts of it did make me think of the Palme d’Or-winning 2022 film, Triangle of Sadness.) 

The film was shot on Vancouver Island in Canada. It tells the story of a rising-star young director, Kris (Einbinder), who has been plucked to revitalize the Camp Miasma film franchise, a decades-old “sleepaway slasher” film franchise, the first of which starred Billy Presley (Anderson) as a young actress. The films are set at Camp Miasma and involve the ongoing killings by a transexual-like being called Little Death, who was once a camper there, and lives in the bottom of the lake and comes out to kill campers out of revenge and hunger.  

Kris arranges to visit Billy at the abandoned sleepaway camp – which was used as the film set for the films – where Billy now lives in a big house in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest. Billy is kooky; she’s a stoner, she acts “crazy” for fun, and there’s a Grey Gardens vibe in the house. Kris’s girlfriend, with whom she is in a polygamous relationship (“sounds like cheating,” Billy tells Kris after the latter describes what a “poly” relationship means), jokes with her that Billy seems like the recluse from Sunset Boulevard. (Kris’s girlfriend is dating a bisexual man named Thor, who is the source of several good laughs in the film.) Kris says that her primary partner is not her girlfriend, but her work.  

Meanwhile, Billy practically divorced herself from her work. She stopped acting after a few bit parts after her starring role in the first film. Kris wants her in the new film, but her agent points out, “Billy Presley has about as much star power now as Bruce Springsteen’s sister.” Kris’s first feature, which she “made for like six dollars,” caught the attention of the right people and some critics, which is why she was picked to revive the franchise.  

Like many other Hollywood franchises, Camp Miasma films have not aged particularly well. They’ve been dubbed “problematic.” The films are, among other things, highly transphobic, Kris points out. She says that the studio wants the new film to be “elevated,” which is code for “woke.” “I want to create something fresh and new,” Kris tells Billy as they smoke pot on the porch at her house in the snowy mountains. Over a dinner of fried chicken and inventive scenes involving dipping sauces, Kris asks Billy if she liked her first film. The retired star pauses. “Oh god, you hated it!” declares Kris. Billy simply says, “Well, you remade Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain.”  

This movie is hilarious, strange, and very self-aware (“Why do I feel like there’s about to be a jump-scare?” Kris asks in one scene, citing a horror genre trope). I won’t say too much more about the plot, because it’s best seen for oneself. However, I will say this is a unique film, and it won the Queen Palm (as awarded by an independent jury) at Cannes. It’s the kind of film that makes this film festival special – a bizarre, exciting, fresh take on an old idea (horror film). It touches on ageism, sexism, sexual desire, gay relationships, and pokes fun at Hollywood, too. Kris’s agent, played by Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman, tells Kris of her idea to have Billy in the new film, “They’re not going to want to make a reboot starring a 60-year-old actress who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.”   

Einbinder was featured at the Kering Women in Motion talk at the Carlton Hotel during the film festival. She spoke with Variety in the salon, commenting on her experience of being at the festival, “It’s totally surreal. None of it is lost on me.” She later added, “I feel so unbelievably fortunate [to work with such amazing people]. I’m so lucky.”   

 

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Of working with Sex Education star Gillian Anderson, she reflected on their instant chemistry during filming. “It was just swell [working with Anderson].” She said how her character Kris’s discomfort with her body and sex was very relatable. “I think it’s something we don’t talk about, and I think that’s why this film is so important.”  

The actress praised the film’s director, Schoenbrun, saying, “There’s this idea that you have to be a hard ass to make good work. [But Jane showed] you can be kind, warm, and supportive, and you can still create good work.”