Jane Schoenbrun has been out here reclaiming nostalgia as a force for good when it has never felt more weaponized and toxic — not by treating it as a retreat from the difficulties of the present day, but as a way of communing with the person someone used to be and the one they’ve become. The director’s last film, I Saw the TV Glow, had a Buffy-esque show at its center, and their new one, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, revolves around a decades-old slasher franchise called Camp Miasma. But more significant than these objects of nostalgia are the feelings they engendered in the films’ respective protagonists, how they resonated in ways the characters weren’t able to entirely articulate then and still might not be ready to now. Kris (Hannah Einbinder), the 29-year-old filmmaker in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, has always been mesmerized by the original Camp Miasma — especially the live-wire look in final girl Billy’s (Amanda Fix) eyes as she’s approached by Little Death (Jack Haven), a spear-wielding killer wearing a mask made out of a ceiling vent, while she’s losing her virginity.
Kris credits the movie, which she encountered as a probably too-young kid on VHS, for her queer awakening — though as an adult who’s been hired to reboot the series with a gloss of social justice, she talks about it with an academic distance and a hearty dose of industry cynicism as a “zombie IP” about “gender trauma” that’s also “blatantly transphobic.” In an attempt to spark inspiration for a new Little Death origin story, Kris pays a visit to the present-day Billy, played by a regal, knowing Gillian Anderson, who retreated from public life after that first installment and whom Kris hopes to persuade to appear in her reboot. Billy, who speaks in a honeyed southern accent, dresses in Old Hollywood drag, and lives alone in the defunct summer camp where Camp Miasma was shot, isn’t just an envoy from another generation but a representative of a more visceral relationship with art. Camp Miasma, Kris counters, is really about two things, “flesh and fluids,” and over the course of a few feverish days together, the women find a common ground that involves both, in different ways.
But even summarizing the first absolute banger of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival this way threatens to boil the film down to its themes and its craft, the way Kris does with the original Camp Miasma, at the cost of delving into the experience of watching it. (“Split diopter,” Kris whispers to Billy while the pair watch a print of the original movie, much to Billy’s annoyance.) Schoenbrun’s film is rich with ideas, among them the affecting ways that it pulls Kris’s inability to get out of her own head during sex toward her insistence on intellectualizing her work. The film twines those threads together during an intimate encounter with Billy in which the younger woman confesses to the cinematic fantasies she has to vanish into to actually experience pleasure. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma traffics in emotions even more. In one scene, Little Death lays outrageously bloody waste to the frisky incoming counselors of Camp Miasma (played by Zach Cherry, Quintessa Swindell, and Eva Victor, among others) in a long take set to a needle drop that shouldn’t be spoiled but that adds up to something worthy of blissing out to.
It’s also gorgeous, from the lush matte backdrop paintings behind the snowbound camp to the darkness of Kris’s intent silhouette outlined against the screen in Billy’s home theater. And it’s drolly funny, from the camp qualities of how Billy seduces Kris with offerings of KFC dipping sauce, to the presence of Thor, the mustachioed bisexual that the poly Kris’s partner is dating, to the way Billy responds to learning about an infamous instance of Disney minstrelsy with a guileless “Mickey did that?” Schoenbrun certainly isn’t taking aim at wokeness, but they are gently acknowledging that what is politically correct and what we respond to do not always line up. And if it’s not causing harm to others, there’s no shame in the latter, whether it involves a movie or what turns you on. The obviousness and the outdatedness of Camp Miasma, which is different parts Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepaway Camp, and The Burning, doesn’t make it any less formative or important to Kris.
There’s a vulnerability to being touched by something, to finding something sexy or scary, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is filled with a wry but immense compassion for its heroine and her habit of holding up concepts to ward off her own reactions. When Schoenbrun’s movie does give its main character everything she wants, it doesn’t play like a withdrawal into the past at all but something more poignant — a means of reconnecting with some part of that initial encounter with a work that moved her and bringing it with her into the present.
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