“There is a hole in the lake where the movies come from” is one of those incredible lines that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma just throws at you. And the longer you watch Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature film, which opened the 2026 Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the more the feeling arises that the American writer-director has touched upon something painfully true about our tangible relationships with media. Few filmmakers seem to have such an innate understanding of the ways media artifacts can become physical manifestations, capable of seducing, destroying, and even penetrating one’s flesh. Be it a grainy 16mm film reel, a dusty VHS, or the digital ephemerality floating around the Internet — all of them feed a sense of the self and reshape the fabric of our realities, as long as we place our hearts and trust in them.
With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun has unpacked these ideas in a near-miraculous manner, as the film is somewhat of a miracle itself. It’s first and foremost a galaxy-brained postmodern homage to the schlocky B-horror films that made big bucks in the ’80s before sprouting into long-running franchises, often with diminishing returns in the direct-to-video era. A gorgeous opening credit sequence runs us through the history of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, all stemming from a 1980 slasher featuring a spear-wielding serial killer called “Little Death,” who emerges from a lake nearby a haunted summer camp to slice open all the drunk and horny teens. Through newspaper clippings, stacked VHS tapes, film posters, props, and other memorabilia, we glide through the timeline of the Little Death films, up to the point the IP inevitably fades into obscurity.
That’s where Hannah Einbinder comes in as Kris, an emerging queer filmmaker commissioned by opportunistic studio execs to resurrect the “zombie IP” — this time, of course, by making it “woke” and palatable for Gen Z. This “voice of a generation,” who in a prior work retold Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) from the perspective of the shower curtain, intends to deploy the reboot as some kind of Trojan horse. Her goal is to transform the transphobia and misogyny of the original into something, well… that’s the problem for now, as she still needs to uncover the deeper powers that dwell inside a film that completely shaped her sexual identity, ever since she saw the original on VHS as a little girl. Much of that had to do with the piercing gaze of Camp Miasma‘s starlet Billy, who as “the final girl” witnesses Little Death’s onslaught while losing her virginity on screen. Like the franchise itself, Billy has since faded into obscurity, prompting Kris to seek her out in her remote dwelling, all in the hope of unpacking her deep-rooted attraction to Camp Miasma.
The film often teases that this encounter with Billy, perfectly inhabited by Gillian Anderson, could turn out to be just as tragic as Joe Gillis’ fateful run-in with Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). And while Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma contains plenty of unsettling moments, the film perfectly straddles the line between creeping psychosexual horror and tender melodrama about sexual re-awakening. Billy, it turns out, actually lives on the abandoned grounds that served as the set for Camp Miasma. In a sense, then, she has chosen to stay in the fictional world of that film forever, which to her seems more real than the normative reality outside the summer camp. What she ultimately offers Kris is to also surrender to the violent power of the Camp Miasma films, to utilize their affective force as a conduit to channel her innermost desires.
To describe the ways Schoenbrun gradually unravels layers of sexual repression would take away some of the mystery of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Like their sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow (2024), this latest is a shapeshifter of a film that ingeniously twists and turns, with constant oscillations between moods, textures, and vibes, all to critically examine the fraught relationship between fiction and reality. It’s actually less Sunset Boulevard and more Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) in the way the medium of film is deployed to metaphysically transmogrify the deepening relationship between these two women. But as cerebral as that may sound, Schoenbrun proves themself once again a master of “flesh and fluids” — to quote Billy on the attraction to Camp Miasma. Over the course of just three films and one upcoming novel, they have become the rare contemporary auteur who doesn’t just mimic the body horror of David Cronenberg, but actually expands on the philosophical concerns of cinema’s foremost existentialist. Cronenberg’s most searching depiction of trans re-awakening in his late-career opus Crimes of the Future (2022) seems like a spiritual departure point for Schoenbrun, who crafted an even more gentle and all the more forceful film about how opened flesh gives way to a genuine transformation of the self.
Referencing so many male auteurs in relation to Schoenbrun might seem unfair, were it not for the fact that this director is so keen on intertextual plays themselves. There is a conscious artificiality on display, with the technicolor-coded snowfall in the backdrop of many scenes making it seem like the two women inhabit their own Douglas Sirk picture, all while on the set of a bloody horror film. Meanwhile, a well-placed cameo by Patrick Fischler points to the labyrinthine lesbian dreamworld of Mulholland Drive (2001). And just like David Lynch, Schoenbrun seems to derive great pleasure from rescrambling the film whenever and however they want, using the logic of dreams and nightmares to quite literally turn the narrative of the film against itself. Where some directors might hide their own voice behind such references, Schoenbrun actually uses them to reveal more about themselves. The framing of the film-within-the-film invites us to more intimately imagine how Schoenbrun is using the medium they clearly love so much to cinematically explore non-binary states of being, as these so often remain misrepresented on screen.
All of that is done mostly through play. Yes, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a serious and touching work, but one that primarily points at the pleasure of slipping into a role. Playing with the medium of film, playing with yourself, or allowing another to play with you are all offered as potential ultimate sources of pleasure. It can be scary, it can be horny, it can be messy, and it can be tender and loving. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is all of these things all at once. For a film that on the surface seems to be stuck in the past, it’s actually one of the most profound cinematic explorations of sexuality and identity of our recent times, arguably making it Schoenbrun’s first genuine masterpiece.
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