Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.22.26
★★★★ 4 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Jane Schoenbrun begins with a filmmaker trying to revive a worn-out slasher franchise and turns that assignment into a slippery exploration of horror, sexuality, memory and the stories people use to understand themselves. Hannah Einbinder is strong, but Gillian Anderson gives one of the year’s great performances as the reclusive final girl whose account of the original film may or may not be trustworthy. The movie keeps moving between reality and mythology without flattening either into an easy answer. It is strange, layered and genuinely provocative—worth seeing for Anderson alone, with much more waiting underneath.
Full review — contains spoilers
I really did not know what to make of this going into it. Even from the trailers, I could not get a good read on what Jane Schoenbrun was trying to do. Was this going to be a generic slasher? Some kind of body-horror thing? Body dysmorphia? Gross-out horror? I don't particularly like gross-out movies, and even the word "miasma" makes me think of something gross, slimy and icky. So I went in hesitant.
I liked this very much. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a filmmaker brought in to resurrect the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise, which has been run into the ground by years of sequels. Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the original film's final girl, now an aging and deeply reclusive movie star who has essentially disappeared. Kris becomes convinced that she needs Billy in order to understand what this franchise actually was and what a new movie should be. From there, the movie turns into something much stranger than a straightforward movie about making a horror movie.
Gillian Anderson is phenomenal in this. Oscar-level performance to me, period. I did not know she could pull off this Southern accent either, but she does. Billy is really the center of the movie for me because you're never entirely certain how much of what she is telling Kris should be taken literally. The movie moves between reality, fantasy, movie mythology, sexuality, memory, psychosis and whatever else is happening here without always drawing a clean line around any of it, and I liked that.
Kris comes into this with her own interpretation of Camp Miasma. These movies played a formative role in her own sexuality and her understanding of herself as a queer woman, so naturally she looks back at the franchise and sees all of those things inside it. Billy keeps pushing back. As far as Billy is concerned, Kris is trying to turn the movie into something it wasn't. The story was about Little Death. Stop trying to rewrite it into something else and understand the story that was already there. That push and pull was fascinating to me.
There are also hints, and then considerably more than hints, of attraction between Billy and Kris. They have fun chemistry together, but the movie is doing more with that than simply setting up a relationship. It's dealing with horror movies as formative experiences, what they mean to teenagers, sex and fear getting tangled together, and the way some movie you watched when you were 14 or 15 can attach itself permanently to the way you understand yourself, even though the people who made the damn thing may insist it wasn't about what you think it was about at all.
There are layers to this, and I don't really like jumping on the bandwagon just because everybody else says some art-house movie is brilliant before most people have even had an opportunity to see it. That's not particularly interesting to me. But in this case, I get it. I think this is one of the most well-done films of the year.
If you're interested in horror, see it. If you're interested in art-house movies, see it. Honestly, if you just want to go to the theater and see something interesting that gives you something to think about afterward, see it. Gillian Anderson alone is worth the ticket, but there's a lot more here than Gillian Anderson. I thought this was really, really good.