Review: TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Chris, a young filmmaker, gets a gig as the director to resurrect an old slasher franchise. As a young and queer and independent director she's demographically perfect to reboot a genre long characterised as anti-sex. If she's doing it, it's gotta be right for now, right? Let the wokies take that. But then, after a meet and greet with the original final girl that's straight out of an '80s horror flick, she is entranced and pleasurably fearful of the older Billy Presley who has been living in voluntary obscurity since the first Camp Miasma movie. All the plans Chris had for the origin story fade to invisibility as she tries to get Billy to tell her what her crucial look in the eye was about all those years ago. The suits won't be thrilled (you'll meet them) but Chris is about to go for a career igniting ride.

Jane Shoenbrun's third feature sees the production values catch up with her ideas. Those sprites of the mind are flying in the light like fireflies and make this characteristically slower paced outing rich and strange (which, Schoenbrun herself will soon be). First, there might be a reference to every single '80s slasher that ever was (as well as a host of them from before). Second, her themes of untreated pain and alienation in the nooks of lives, are here more concentrated than in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. The discipline is palpable and makes the whole busy movie rush by.

Apart from those themes we have a lot of notes about cult movie fandom, video culture and seeing grown up things too young. It's about the slasher genre and why it keeps coming back for new crops of teenagers before and behind the screen and it addresses the misconception of the subgenre that it is a conservative warning about having sex too young. I sing again with the hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast: The movie's rad, the killer is the puritain. And it is about the monster of the Camp Miasma franchise, a box headed blade-wielder known as Little Death. I think I knew that little death was a euphemism not long after I knew I could have my own and that was from reading (and almost  all that that implies). Keep you eye on that concept and you'll find the slow focus of the central mechanism of this movie roll into clarity.

Schoenbrun brings her multi-media montage to a frenzy. When the time comes to evoke gthe '80s style in quote from the film within the film, she gleefully overstates the geysers of blood but goes on to gtakea more considered look at a massacre scene and the look in the eye of the then teenaged Billy as life events converge on her during the shoot all those decades ago. This is a rich mix.

Hannah Einbinder shows us depth from the word go as an ambitious but still timid young artistwith big issues; her trek is a constant development. However, it is Gillian Anderson who takes and keeps centre screen with an updated Norma Desmond of the slasher movie. She is clearly relishing this role, by turns monstrous and nurturing.

If this is what Schoenbrun can do with only two feature films notched up, I can only wait for the next. I don't care if she is accused of ghettoising her sexuality the way others are charged with doing that with their ethnicity, aren't artists meant to express what they know? Let's be fair about this. Then again, her next project is aa series adaptation of Cherles Burns' eerie coming of age graphic novel Black Hole. Some carry over themes in that and she uses the stark black and white of the comic I think we're in for a treat. Meantime, try this flavoursome third album from an artist worth your attention. Oh, she usually gets compared to Lynch. Sure, but I'm going to add Luis Bunuel.