Cannes: With "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" Jane Schoenbrun doubles down on becoming a defining generational voice.

by Elisa Giudici

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. MUBI

By the time Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at Cannes, Jane Schoenbrun had already become something close to a generational folk hero for younger cinephiles. You could feel it inside the Debussy theater before the lights even went down: critics squeezed onto theater steps, festival attendees treating an Un Certain Regard opener like the hottest ticket on the Croisette, audiences buzzing less about Cannes prestige than about what the filmmaker behind I Saw the TV Glow might do next. And honestly, the excitement makes sense. Few filmmakers right now understand how media obsession functions emotionally for millennials and Gen Z quite like Schoenbrun does. Their work isn’t simply nostalgic. It treats pop culture, horror movies, forgotten VHS relics, fandom rituals, and half-ironic internet cinephilia as part of the architecture of identity itself...

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma pushes those ideas even further, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes frustratingly. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an indie horror darling hired to resurrect Camp Miasma, a cult slasher franchise whose legacy has curdled with time. The original films are now viewed as transphobic artifacts from another era, but Hollywood sees reboot potential in their iconography and fandom cachet. Kris is tasked with modernizing the property, humanizing its iconic killer Little Death, and turning exploitation trash into prestige-friendly IP.

The premise allows Schoenbrun to dive headfirst into the strange ecosystem surrounding cult media: dusty DVDs, horror merchandise, forgotten sequels, fan reinterpretation, queer reclamation, and the emotional residue left behind by movies that stop being entertainment and become part of someone’s internal mythology. Nobody working today captures the texture of that relationship with media quite like Schoenbrun. Every object in the film feels loaded with emotional history. A dusty DVD player pulled from behind a motel desk is treated with the same fetishistic reverence VHS tapes once inspired, as if Schoenbrun were already framing the DVD itself as a dead format, something obsolete enough to become nostalgic, desirable, almost sacred. Analog projectors hum like haunted machines, while old horror memorabilia stops feeling like decoration and starts resembling evidence of emotional survival.

What makes Schoenbrun so compelling, though, is that they’re never simply celebrating nostalgia. Their films understand how curated and performative nostalgia has become, especially online, where identity increasingly gets constructed through references, aesthetics, and media literacy. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma constantly exists in tension between genuine emotional attachment and awareness of how that attachment looks from the outside. That tension defines Kris herself. Einbinder plays her as someone permanently trapped between sincerity and self-consciousness, desperate to feel something authentic while simultaneously narrating her own experience through layers of cultural analysis. The performance is sharp, funny, and emotionally evasive in exactly the right ways.

Hannah Einbender and Gillian Anderson star in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Things become even stranger once Kris tracks down Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original Camp Miasma final girl who disappeared from public life after the first film. Now living alone in the abandoned snowy campground where the movie was shot, Billy spends her days replaying the original film on old projectors and painting surreal images of Little Death like some unholy patron saint of horror fandom. Billy feels like a matryoshka doll of old and recent movie references all nested inside one another: part faded movie star, part cult survivor, part queer phantom haunting the ruins of genre cinema. There’s more than a touch of Norma Desmond in her, but filtered through internet-age absurdism and horror-convention eccentricity. One minute she’s tragic, the next grotesquely funny, the next oddly seductive.

Whenever Billy takes over the screen, the movie loosens up in exciting ways: the irony softens and the emotional messiness starts bleeding through the hyper-curated surface. And for brief stretches, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma becomes genuinely intoxicating. Because the film’s biggest limitation is also its defining characteristic: it’s almost constantly too aware of itself.

Schoenbrun’s cinema thrives on analysis (of genre, fandom, queerness, spectatorship, internet culture) but here the analysis occasionally overwhelms the emotional current underneath. The film often feels less interested in surrendering to camp than in dissecting why camp works in the first place. Every visual choice, every line reading, every exaggerated burst of gore arrives with layers of commentary already attached. At times, it can feel like the cinematic equivalent of scrolling through Letterboxd reviews written at 2 a.m. by people who learned to process emotion through horror movies and media discourse. That’s not necessarily a criticism; in many ways it’s precisely the audience Schoenbrun is speaking to. But the film risks becoming trapped inside the same hyper-literate cinephile ecosystem it’s trying to critique. Watching it at Cannes only emphasized that dynamic. The crowd burst into laughter at references to split-diopter shots and niche horror jargon, recognizing not just the terminology but the entire online performance of cinephilia surrounding it. Meanwhile, the film’s echoes of Sunset Boulevard landed more quietly, exposing a subtle generational divide in how audiences relate to cinema history itself.

And yet, despite all its self-awareness, the film ultimately works best when Schoenbrun allows vulnerability to interrupt the intellectual machinery. The movie’s strongest scenes arrive unexpectedly late, when Kris stops theorizing herself long enough to admit how deeply horror movies shaped her understanding of desire, identity, and performance. In those moments, the film briefly sheds its protective irony and reveals something raw underneath: the fear that media obsession can both save you and trap you inside yourself forever.

That emotional contradiction has always been central to Schoenbrun’s work. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasmamay not hit with the same devastating immediacy as I Saw the TV Glow, but it confirms something just as important: Schoenbrun is one of the few contemporary filmmakers genuinely trying to invent a cinematic language for a generation raised on fandom, irony, parasocial intimacy, and endless media consumption. Even when the film threatens to disappear inside its own commentary, the ambition behind it remains fascinating. And when Schoenbrun finally lets the uncertainty seep through the analysis, the movie becomes something far stranger, sadder, and more alive.

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