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. 

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+