By Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $13.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jess McLeod, Zach Cherry, Dylan Baker, Sarah Sherman, Kevin McDonald, Patrick Fischler, Jack Haven
Intro:
Einbinder and Anderson deserve credit for maintaining the credibility and emotional connection of their characters, anchoring the film despite its dramatic tonal shifts.
Jane Schoenbrun, who previously made two critically adored films about queerness and the eery spirituality of childhood media, is no one’s idea of a commercial filmmaker. In their new film, the metatextual slasher send-up Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma, they mock the idea that they ever could be, delivering a story that transmutes corporate crassness into an intimate vision of art.
The film begins, in one of its many ironic gestures, with director Kris (Hannah Einbinder) starting a new film. After proving her mettle with a pretentious indie horror movie, she is being given the reins of the ‘zombie IP’ Camp Miasma franchise — a fictional slasher series that winks at Friday the 13th and Halloween.
In each iteration of Camp Miasma, promiscuous American teens face supernatural retribution from ‘Little Death’, an androgynous figure in a white cover-all complete with a mask that resembles a screenless TV.
While Kris has been hired by a studio desperate clean up the origin story of a villain who makes Buffalo Bill look woke, she herself wants to tap into her childhood nostalgia and cast the original ‘final girl’ of the franchise: Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), a flamboyant Southern belle who now lives in the abandoned set of the Camp Miasma films.
So, Kris, playfully following exaggerated horror tropes, finds herself welcomed by an ambiguous stranger, lured into the screening room, and entering an erotic plane where backgrounds are painted, villains live in vibrantly-decorated lairs, and nothing is as real as a movie.
But Teenage Sex, for all its homages to the genre, does not give the thrills of a genuine horror film — the sequences recreating old slasher films are too camp, the blood effects too gratuitous and too digital. It’s especially disappointing because Schoenbrun’s earlier films displayed such loving and unsettling recreations of other media forms. Instead, a film that should have straddled horror and comedy like Jordan Peele’s masterful Get Out often feels like the skits from the latest Scary Movie.
It is almost miraculous, then, that the movie achieves something genuine as it moves into its deconstructed final act. Kris and Billy, having both found a profound personal awakening in the crude commercial product of Camp Miasma, enjoy a tender eroticism together — embodied in the image of them embracing on a pile of garish movie snacks.
Einbinder and Anderson deserve credit for maintaining the credibility and emotional connection of their characters, anchoring the film despite its dramatic tonal shifts.
Perhaps, in this audaciously sincere satire, Schoenbrun is showing both the power and limits of commercial filmmaking — or perhaps they are just making their pitch for the next Scream sequel.
