‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Is About Jane Schoenbrun’s Struggle to Achieve Orgasm [Cannes]

Jane Schoenbrun. I respect the ambition, the drive to be original and provocative, but sometimes too much is not necessarily better.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” comes after “I Saw the TV Glow,” an acclaimed 2024 indie that plays like a David Lynch film infused with trans themes. “Camp Miasma,” Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher riff, is similar, yet way more theoretical; underneath the blood and camp, it’s really an intensely personal film about repression and sexual anxiety.

The story follows Kris, an indie filmmaker played by Hannah Einbinder, who becomes consumed by rebooting a cult horror franchise centered on a gender-fluid killer named Little Death. Her trip to visit the original film’s reclusive star Billy — a somewhat miscast Gillian Anderson in full faded-diva mode — slowly turns into a psychological spiral.

Billy, now living in isolation near a remote cabin by the British Columbia border, enchants Kris, and the bond they form starts to blur the line between professional obsession and psychological fixation, pulling Kris deeper into the mythology of Camp Miasma and destabilizing her sense of reality.

What makes the film somewhat compelling is also what makes it frustrating. Schoenbrun has a genuinely original visual and emotional language; the exaggerated gore, artificial backdrops, and surreal slasher imagery all function like extensions of Kris’ interior being. The movie isn’t trying to mimic old horror films so much as reinterpret what Schoenbrun must have felt watching these movies as a lonely, confused kid growing up as an outsider.

At its best, the film taps into something raw and difficult to articulate: the sensation of intellectually understanding desire while remaining physically disconnected from it. Kris has a severe discomfort with sex and intimacy, with a near inability to achieve sexual climax. In essence, Kris is Jane, a clear stand-in for the filmmaker’s own physical and emotional discomforts.

This film can feel smothered by its own self-consciousness. Nearly every reference, homage, or metaphor arrives with an implicit wink, as though Schoenbrun is anxious the audience might miss the point. There’s no real mold to it, no tone fully planted — just ideas. The result is a movie that sometimes feels trapped by theory and irony. The pacing drifts, the dream logic grows repetitive, and the meta-Hollywood satire feels thin. The movie risks collapsing until it’s saved by a wildly inventive final stretch.

Beneath the aesthetics and horror references, the film is essentially Schoenbrun turning a slasher movie into a metaphorical account of trying to achieve orgasm — or, more broadly, trying to access physical pleasure without dissociating from the noise. The entire film circles around the agony of being trapped inside one’s own body while craving the kind of instinctive surrender everyone else seems capable of. That vulnerability gives the movie its power, even when the execution becomes messy, indulgent, and emotionally remote.