Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a young queer filmmaker who has been honored at Sundance. She is hired to reboot Camp Miasma, a moldering slasher franchise. Before she starts, she goes looking for Billy (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the original final girl. Billy now lives as an eccentric recluse at the abandoned camp where the old movies were shot.

What begins as a casting trip slowly turns into a courtship. From there it becomes something the film deliberately never spells out. Schoenbrun sets clips from the fictional 1980s-style original, including a decapitated punk whose head exhales pot smoke, against the charged, uneasy relationship between the two women.

The film is a metatextual horror-comedy-romance. It looks at slasher tropes, the "final girl," gender identity and repression, and how the movies we watch can shape who we become.

Critics note that despite its title, the film is less about sex and death than about sex and cinema. It is interested in how both have an uncanny power to get inside us and change us for good. Schoenbrun blurs the line between lived experience and the media we consume. The slasher genre, with its punishment of desire and its surviving "final girl," becomes a way to talk about gender, queerness and repression.

Reviewers have also called it a movie about getting out of your head and into your body. One reading focuses on learning to enjoy sex after transition, after years of trying to have good sex in the wrong body. The blood-soaked, euphoric ending treats the genre's violence as release and liberation rather than punishment.

Trans embodiment reading: The film is a story about learning to live in your body, and about the pleasure that becomes possible after transition.

This is Jane Schoenbrun's third feature, after We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. It continues the director's trans-coded horror genre mashups and was the first to premiere at Cannes (Un Certain Regard) rather than Sundance.

Critics read it as a metatextual ode to slashers and an education in slasher movies, gender and queerness. Variety called it a "delicious slasher homage," and The Playlist called it a "refined sapphic ode." Other outlets were colder: Salon said it "withers in metaphor hell." The film adds to a wider trend of queer and trans filmmakers reclaiming horror conventions.

Reception has been mixed to positive. Praise goes to Gillian Anderson's gloriously unhinged performance, and the San Francisco Chronicle called Hannah Einbinder \"the real surprise.\" Critics also credited the film's clever slasher homage and its erotic, self-aware tone. The Hollywood Reporter described it as strange and frustrating but ultimately fulfilling.

Criticism centers on imbalance. Some found it an uneven horror-romance that leaves viewers unsatisfied, and Salon argued it gets lost in its own metaphors. Overall, it is a divisive but distinctive entry from Schoenbrun.