Prepare for a flesh mob of desire and delirium, voyeuristic verve and meta mayhem as Jane Shoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (A) delivers its potent and cerebral poly-genre selves to the screen. This ambitious auteur’s boogeyman babylon is carrying enough baggage to unpack over multiple summers and sequels of sleepaway camp misadventures, and it’s rarely anything but mesmerizing. The plot follows a movie director (Hannah Einbinder, vulnerable and surprisingly even more layered than her TV work) scouting for a years-later reboot of a slasher series hatched in a bygone era. The filmmaker becomes fixated on casting the reclusive actress who portrayed the original “final girl” (a vexing and fascinating Gillian Anderson, somehow with Dolly Parton-style Southern accent). Set at the stark scene of the crimes of the first film in the fictional franchise, this wise work lovingly reframes the slasher genre entirely, remixing the eroticism of awakened carnal pleasures in the form of virginal victims combined with the carnage inflicted by a nocturnal nemesis out for blood. The campground phantom in this case is called “Little Death,” whose lacy frocks are matched with a mask appearing like Salvador Dali invented an HVAC vent to a perplexing infinity. Those expecting an all-out bloodbath will get only a few moments of triumphant truncated transfusions to nowhere as most of the more cerebral film fixates on the relationship between the two central characters. Talky, creative contours filled with horror film conventions serve as a veritable field guide and orientation compass for unknotting the tropes course of both movies and humanity. Einbinder is rather divine as the central protagonist grappling with identity, and Anderson is great fun unlocking mysteries of her own between preparing fried chicken picnics and fusing time and space. From the spry nostalgic music to witty callbacks and flashbacks to flat-out nightmarish visions plumbing the depths of gender and storytelling, this is a significant indie knockout. Shoenbrun demonstrates again they are preternaturally prepared for such a dandy candyland through the heart of the splatter.
