From this straightforward setup, Schoenbrun unleashes an outpouring of imagination and invention that places the film on a level of intricacy and extravagance comparable to that of Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Scenes from across the “Camp Miasma” franchise play as films within the film, realized in elaborate detail. The result is gleefully gory: one victim is cut in half at the waist, their legs still standing as blood spurts; another is impaled on a spear and shattered to mist against a tetherball pole. But these scenes are filmed with such playfulness that the shock value is completely dissipated. (I say this as a squeamish, gore-averse viewer.)
“Teenage Sex and Death” opens on the set of the original movie, as seen from the point of view of the killer, a figure known as Little Death (Jack Haven), whose most striking feature is a kind of helmet made from a cubic metal air vent, which masks the face behind a pattern of concentric squares and gives the character’s breathing a distinctive labored sound. The glimpse of “Camp Miasma” and its production functions as backstory for Kris’s trip, and sets the tone for the odd encounters that follow. At Kris’s hotel, the desk clerk turns out to be one of the locals who were recruited to act in “Camp Miasma, Part VI” (which Kris watches in her room), and it emerges that Billy’s compound, a former sleepaway camp, was the location for the shooting of “Camp Miasma.” Prowling the grounds, Kris finds a building labelled “cinema,” and inside is a projector with a film reel cued up to the scene in “Camp Miasma” that most captivates her—Little Death entering a room where Squeak is losing her virginity.
“Desire,” Kris writes in her notebook while watching “Part VI,” and it is Squeak’s mix of desire and terror in the first movie that makes Kris’s encounter with Billy so erotically charged. Kris’s partner, Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown), suspects that the reclusive Billy will resemble Norma Desmond, the delusional ex-star in “Sunset Boulevard,” but Billy (who’s well aware of the comparison) is funny, candid, insightful, and intensely sympathetic. She notes that Kris has been approaching her project “academically” and urges her to speak freely. Kris opens up about her sexual inhibitions while worrying that such candor is unprofessional. Billy responds that these personal revelations are intrinsically part of the work, and that their collaboration has already begun.
Much of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is a classic two-hander, sharply written with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine. For all the movie’s self-awareness, it’s filled with tenderness and humor. Einbinder endows Kris with pent-up intellectual energy awaiting explosive release, and Anderson’s Billy is a kaleidoscopic showcase of emotional vitality and natural, florid theatricality. Among the movie’s daring inspirations is the ample screen time given to movie-watching, whether by Kris alone or by her and Billy together. Each one of these viewing sessions is more than merely an opportunity for ingenious film-within-a-film evocations of “Camp Miasma.” They’re dramatic scenes punctuated by significant surprises: an accidental interruption, a trenchant observation, a raucous gag, a cathartic gaze. This built-in doubleness—of the watchers and the watched—lends “Teenage Sex and Death” a complexity that Schoenbrun amplifies in surreal, symbolic, and allegorical ways.
Throughout, Schoenbrun revels in the ambiguous fusion of artifice and realism. The foremost innovation is the evocation of Little Death’s perspective, by means of an unusual kind of camera movement—wavering and wandering, somewhere between smooth and jittery—which catches the viewer in the limbic system, going beyond disgust to the uncanny. The ostensibly transphobic element of “Camp Miasma” is that Little Death was gender-fluid, a cruelly bullied former camper whose killing sprees are displaced revenge. Schoenbrun, a trans filmmaker who explicitly addressed the trans experience in “I Saw the TV Glow,” here conceives something even more radical: a cinematic trans gaze, one that is visually distinctive in its tone while extruding violence endured into violent fantasy.
