Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review – Gillian Anderson superb in queer slasher spectacular

Cannes film festival: Young indie film-maker Kris tracks down Anderson’s Final Girl for a remake of a beloved horror, to find fantasy and reality collapsed

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. As before with Schoenbrun’s films, I found myself thinking of Gore Vidal’s (still unfashionable) Myra Breckinridge novel.

This is a film that somehow persuades you that the 80s slasher genre is an exalting and liberatingly progressive experience. As before, in her We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Schoenbrun pulls off the trick of inventing an imaginary media phenomenon and treating it with complete fan-seriousness – an online horror game and cult scary TV show in the first two films and now a slasher movie franchise called Camp Miasma about a teen transgender killer called Little Death wearing a ceiling vent as a mask (why is never explained) who periodically emerges from a lake in a sleepaway camp where scantily clad young people will be brutally speared.

The opening credits wittily walk us through the franchise’s initial wild success and slump in the later movies, the merch and the video games and the insufferable cultural studies discourse about its “problematic” treatment of gender.

Now young indie film-maker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to direct a lucrative origin-story reboot of Camp Miasma, a dream job as she has been obsessed with this series since illicitly watching the first movie at the age of eight, thrilled by feelings she still can’t understand by the Final Girl’s mortal jeopardy, preparing to die while somehow experiencing the killer’s point-of-view: feelings that Kris’s unhappy, painful experiences with sex have never equalled.