Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

I’m starting to feel trolled by writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Like, I’m not sure I will ever fully get their work—and maybe that’s exactly what they want? To say Schoenbrun’s latest two films have been wildly critically acclaimed would be an understatement; the cinephiles over on Letterboxd are not far behind. But, I was largely baffled by I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, and now feel a bit more of a direct connection to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which has a lot of similarities, is overall a bit more straightforward, and then veers toward the end into similarly surreal directions.

If nothing else, Schoenbrun clearly has a thing for 80s and 90s TV and movies, I Saw the TV Glow being about an obsession with a 90s TV show, and this one about an obsession with a long-running slasher movie franchise spawned in the 80s. In the world of Teenage Sex and Death, the Camp Miasma series is meant to have existed right alongside the likes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and also similarly stretched well into the following decades with endless sequels and reboots, with diminishing returns. The opening credits are incredibly economical storytelling, the camera passing over a series of newspaper clippings about franchise stars, new movies, and “woke” reactions to the earlier films—particularly an overtly transphobic scene in the first one.

The villain in Camp Miasma is a person with a sort of helmet made of concentric squares that look like those of an air conditioning vent. This seems far less functional for a serial killer than even a hockey mask, but whatever. In the franchise world, this villain’s name is The Little Death. I can’t tell whether Schoenbrun is being tongue-in-cheek or deliberately on the nose here: the French phrase for an orgasm, la petite mort, literally translates to “the little death.” There’s a moment when all these old slasher movies are described as “about two things: flesh, and fluids.”

Much of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feels like Schoenbrun fucking with us. The protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder, great as always), is a filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise. She has driven to the middle of nowhere to meet with the “final girl” from the first film, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, always a welcome presence), who never appeared in any of the sequels and now lives as a recluse. Kris feels that a meeting about potential collaboration will “unlock” her vision for a new film. Anyway, in one of Teenage Sex and Death’s best scenes, Kris is on a group video call from her car with several studio people, who go out of their way to oversimplify this vision: “It’s meta!” No, it’s not meta. “It’s allegorical!” No, it’s not allegorical. Except that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so obviously meta—particularly in this very scene, when Kris literally says, “If anything, you are all characters in a movie!”—and allegorical. There’s another scene in which Billy Presley complains about how the Camp Miasma movies are discussed in such academic ways, and if this movie isn’t academic, then I don’t know what it is.

It may yet be that I don’t quite know what it is. This is apparently Jane Schoenbrun’s M.O. And by the end of Teenage Sex and Death, which is very much about both of those things but also adult sex and death, and transcending both sexual and gender repression, it becomes the very thing it is examining, all while sticking firmly to its allegory. I mean, as far as I can tell.

The key difference between Teenage Sex and Death and I Saw the TV Glow is that I was far more taken with this movie. I found it far more narratively inviting, even as it gets a little gonzo-weird in its final act. Gillian Anderson is excellent as Billy Presley, even as the film quite directly acknowledges, not once but twice, the character’s obvious similarity to Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Normal Desmond deluded herself into thinking she was still in the movies she used to make, but Billy Presley actually is.

It seems important to mention the transgender elements of this movie, which were an even bigger part of I Saw the TV Glow, in ways I wondered if I just could not quite get because I do no identify as trans myself. Schoenbrun uses the “Little Death” character itself to represent transness here, which felt to me a bit like a mixing of metaphors. I’m not sure if Schoenbrun intends for their work to be impenetrably academic, but it’s not difficult to imagine these films being analyzed to the hilt in Queer Studies courses. Maybe I’m just not smart enough, and perhaps I should sit in on one of these classes and have the with-it youth explain it to me.

If nothing else, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is well-acted, well-shot, and makes effective use of an obviously limited budget for its effects shot, which sometimes look like matte paintings but in a clearly intended way. Even with all its bonkers surrealism that got very close to losing me, the narrative kept me compelled—and, not for nothing, but people coming to this just for the slasher elements will get something way different from what they bargained for, but still get plenty of scenes of excessive and cartoonish violence and blood. As already noted, it’s about flesh and fluids, and in the end, how cinema historically stimulated those two things.

*It’s not quite an orgasmic experience but it’s fun to watch someone else aspire to it.*

Overall: B