‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ is a Gloriously Strange, Overstuffed Experience 

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ is a Gloriously Strange, Overstuffed Experience 

By Alex McPherson

Director Jane Schoenbrun’s surrealist meta–slasher-satire-character-study “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is ambitious and wholly unique, even if occasionally muddled by the weight of its dense ideas.

We follow Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), an academic queer filmmaker hired by a big studio to direct a reboot of the “Camp Miasma” slasher-film franchise. The series has, over the years, become reduced to bargain-bin sequels and cultural irrelevance, beautifully visualized in a nostalgic, acerbic opening title sequence.

The villain, “Little Death,” wears an HVAC air vent on their head and carries a spear, skewering any poor soul who dares to stay at the titular camp.

Kris has always felt a special attachment to the series (“special attachment” is an understatement, as we later find out). She wants to make the original’s “Final Girl” Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) the main character of this new outing. Studio reps and her agent (played by Sarah Sherman) aren’t thrilled, and are more interested in Kris sanitizing and “de-cancelling” the franchise’s transphobic core for a modern audience. 

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

Billy retired from acting after the original film was released, but Kris sees an opportunity to capture that initial spark. It’s all the better, and weirder, that Billy now resides at a remote lakeside cabin in the Pacific Northwest at Camp Rivoli, the abandoned campground where the first “Miasma” was filmed.

Things are strange from the get-go, with Kris barely being able to find Camp Rivoli and wandering into a local cinema. A projector flickers to life and Kris watches the scene where young Billy (Amanda Fix) loses her virginity before being stabbed by Little Death — the sequence that stuck with Kris the most, even if she can’t quite identify why it has that effect on her. 

She then meets present-day Billy, who resembles Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” with a southern twang, seductive aura, and love of weed. The two quickly bond over a basket of KFC chicken tenders and grow closer from there.

They both deconstruct their attachment to the “Miasma” franchise and find new avenues to explore — namely, further unlocking desire, pleasure, and good ‘ole cinephilia amid the blood-drenched fantasy of Little Death.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is, like Schoenbrun’s previous “I Saw the TV Glow,” not for all tastes, so obviously personal that it threatens to leave behind viewers who aren’t willing to go along with its swerving rhythms. 

Indeed, Schoenbrun’s latest project has a ton on its mind, from critiquing the slasher genre and the injustices of studio moviemaking to, most successfully, examining the powerful influence that films can have over our sense of self. There’s too much going on at any given point, but it’s a compulsively watchable mess that ultimately couldn’t be any other way.

Much of “Camp Miasma” rests on the shoulders of Einbinder and Anderson, and they’re both fully up to the task. Einbinder is the standout — able to show Kris’s evolution from high-strung, awkward, nerdy intellectual to someone gradually breaking through their shell to embrace their true desires. 

It’s a tough tightrope to walk, and it’s to Einbinder’s credit that Kris never becomes unlikable, just restrained by societal expectations and unsure of what they truly want in life; there’s also a deep connection to Billy and Little Death that defies traditional reason.

Einbinder is able to flex her comedic chops from time to time, but Schoenbrun’s screenplay treats her character arc seriously, maintaining a mostly successful throughline that continues Schoenbrun’s interest in the complex ways that media can shape us.

Einbinder and Anderson’s chemistry sizzles, and Anderson nails the balance between campiness and sincerity. Billy supports Kris from the jump, but she believes that Kris misunderstands the core of the “Miasma” series and its carnal appeals, which are more base but no less impactful.

Schoenbrun’s direction is, yet again, outstanding, making Camp Rivoli a setting out-of-time and existing in a liminal space between reality and fantasy, complete with dazzling matte paintings and an almost fairy-tale aesthetic. 

Much of the film is spent watching the film-within-the-film (with an ensemble including Eva Victor and Zach Cherry), similar to “TV Glow,” which Schoenbrun recreates with strong attention to period detail. They lean into the cheesiness inherent in its “Friday the 13th” and “Sleepaway Camp” influences while painting Little Death as exacting a sort of justified vengeance.

One ultraviolent sequence in particular, set to a melancholic country song, is cartoonishly gruesome and, perhaps counterintuitively, meditative.

There’s a certain point in Schoenbrun’s film, though, especially when the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred, that it becomes overwhelming and overstuffed. It loses some of its charm to the exhausting throes of self-indulgence. 

At these points, along with some perhaps overly broad commentary on the state of the movie industry, it seems like Schoenbrun throws everything at the wall to see what sticks (literally, in some cases). They sacrifice coherence for pure “feeling” — not inherently a problem, but alienating as new elements keep getting introduced that clumsily fit into the unruly tapestry Schoenbrun has been building.

So, while not as poignant as “TV Glow,” “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is still entirely like nothing else, another example of experimental filmmaking that deserves support whether or not its wild swings fully connect.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is a 2026 horror film directed by Jane Schoenbrun that stars Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Amanda Fix, and Sarah Sherman. It is rated R for bloody violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language, and the run time is 1 hour, 52 minutes. It opened in local theatres Aug. 21. Alex’s Grade: B+

Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ Is A Powerful Meditation on Pain and Healing

Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ Is A Powerful Meditation on Pain and Healing

By Alex McPherson

Exploring sensitive subject matter with grace and humor, director Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby” vividly captures the aftermath of trauma while underlining human resilience and small, unexpected joys that pave the way to hope — largely eschewing melodrama for tenderly observed truth that achieves universality despite the story’s specificity.

Victor’s film, their feature debut, is told in several chapters presented non-chronologically, each devoted to a year. The wry, warm, and precocious Agnes (Victor) is a junior English professor working at a small New England university. Agnes is well-liked by their students but feels stuck physically and emotionally as the world changes around them.

They still live in the same house they shared in grad school with their best friend Lydie (a radiant Naomi Ackie), who has since moved to New York and is now expecting a baby with her partner. 

When Lydie visits Agnes, it’s almost as if she never left. They share a deep friendship built on years of trust and camaraderie, yet there’s a reluctance to discuss the past. Melancholy seeps in among each lingering pause and soft inquiry into how Agnes is really doing. A dinner party with former classmates brings painful memories to the surface, specifically a reference to their former thesis mentor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). 

In the next chapter, set four years earlier, we learn what happened. While Victor positions the event as a surprise, it’s fairly easy to deduce from the opening scenes. Preston, lavishing praise on Agnes’s writing, later sexually assaulted her at his house, profoundly changing how Agnes engages with the world and with herself.

The rest of “Sorry, Baby,” essentially told as a series of vignettes, charts their painful, raw, but also life-affirming path to healing. 

With bursts of unexpected humor, Victor illustrates fluctuations of empathy and apathy in a world that often refuses to listen, showing Agnes’s resilience each step of the way in a manner that’s not sensationalized or manipulative for the sake of easy resolution.

Indeed, “Sorry, Baby” thrives on its naturalism, capturing both a visceral void and unexpected levity that reflect the unpredictable rhythms of reality. Victor’s film is also a call to consider the different ways each of us experiences the world, and the weight that listening — both to others and to ourselves — carries as we navigate uncertain times.

Victor is remarkable in their portrayal of Agnes, radiating warmth and awkward likability while subtly showing the sadness, anxiety, and fear bubbling beneath the image Agnes displays to the world.

This is revealed in quieter moments where they exist in surroundings both familiar and rendered foreign by the past. It’s an exceptional performance that balances droll comedy with heartbreaking vulnerability, often within the same scene. 

Agnes uses humor to cope and navigate the subtle and not-so-subtle triggers they encounter as the days pass, and Victor’s performance layers tragedy with quiet bravery; Agnes, emotionally damaged though they are, still exists, aware of the emotional minefield that lies before them every day, but persisting regardless.

They hold onto small serendipities — like finding a stray kitten on the street or bonding with a gruff yet wise sandwich shop owner after a panic attack — that bring some light, a recognition that they are capable of being understood.

For all of the sadness at the core of “Sorry, Baby,” it’s worth emphasizing that the film is often funny, as Victor acerbically points out the absurdities and hypocrisies over how society treats Agnes after her assault — from detached doctors and school administrators to the more subtle pressures placed on her by her neighbor-turned-friend-with-benefits Gavin (Lucas Hedges).

The humor is often uncomfortable and near-satirical at points, as Victor encourages us to laugh but also to recognize the deeper injustices at play. They never let these laughs, irreverent though they sometimes are, distract from the drama and themes at the film’s core.

Victor’s filmmaking, too, is remarkably accomplished, bringing us into Agnes’s world without showing us happenings we don’t need to see, and gradually building its own visual vocabulary for expressing Agnes’s trauma.

Eva Victor appears in Sorry, Baby by Eva Victor, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Mia Cioffy Henry.

Mia Cioffi’s cinematography emphasizes empty space as Agnes goes about her days, sometimes patiently, nerve-wrackingly drifting over her surroundings as if there’s some unknown presence nearby, watching and judging them.

Victor doesn’t show the assault itself either, thankfully. Rather, we wait outside Preston’s house as the time of day changes, following Agnes as they drive home and eventually explain what happened in detail to Lydie, who stays by their side as all good friends should. Victor trusts us to believe Agnes and to appreciate her struggles without talking down to us, and the film is all the more powerful for it.

“Sorry, Baby,” then, with its sobering story and tonal swerves, is quite an experience. Victor weaves conflicting emotions together in a far more lifelike way than most films in recent memory.

The few spare scenes where they go slightly off-track into exaggeration and exposition-reliant storytelling stick out, but this ranks among the most essential films of the year thus far, and a much-needed reminder of compassion and the ways we should listen to each other as we battle our own demons.

:”Sorry, Baby” is a 2025 dark comedy-drama written and directed by Eva Victor, produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, and starring Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and Louis Cancelmi. Rated R for sexual content and language, the film is 1 hour, 43 minutes, and is in theatres July 25. Alex’s Grade: A.