Jane Schoenbrun's third feature invents a 1980s slasher franchise, gives it a dozen sequels and a reputation for misogyny and transphobia, then hands the reboot to a young queer director hired to make the whole thing acceptable again. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has no interest in the cleanup job. It argues that the franchise did its damage and its formation in the same gesture, and that a person cannot go back and separate the two. The garbage someone loved at thirteen is not a guilty pleasure awaiting correction. It is the primary document.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, the filmmaker, as someone who has built an entire critical vocabulary to avoid saying the true thing. She is fast and dry in the industry scenes, fluent in the language of reappraisal, and her timing goes strange the moment a conversation turns toward her own body. Gillian Anderson has the better half of the picture as the reclusive star of the original film, and she works several registers below everyone else. Anderson plays a woman who has been looked at professionally for four decades and has since decided precisely what she will hand back. Mystery without pretension. The two of them hold a cabin for most of the running time and the film never feels smaller for it.
Eric Yue, returning from I Saw the TV Glow, photographs the camp in saturated candy color instead of horror murk, so arterial spray registers as one more bright wrapper on the floor. Production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland had twenty-five days in the Pacific Northwest to build the place, and some backdrops read deliberately as matte paintings, artifice admitted rather than concealed. Graham Mason cuts between the reboot's present and the fabricated franchise history without signposting the seam, which is the film's central trick. Alex G scores it as a pop record rather than a horror one, and the opening credits, set to a cover of R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming," play over a collage of trading cards, VHS spines and magazine think pieces. The archive comes first. Everything after is footnote.
The film refuses the apology it appears to be structured around. Kris arrives at the old camp with the academic case against the original already assembled, and the woman who starred in it dismantles the case, not by defending the politics but by returning Kris to what she actually felt watching it. The original punished a girl for wanting something. That punishment is where Kris's desire was born, and no amount of retrospective correction reaches back to unmake it. Schoenbrun stages this as horror comedy, complete with geysers of blood and a killer whose head is built like a camera matte box, but the argument underneath is severe. Pop culture does not shape people politely, and it does not ask about consent.
Not everything lands. I Saw the TV Glow was tighter and more deliberate, and this one lets several ideas run past the point where they could resolve. The doubling between Kris and the older actress thins out in the last act, and the metatextual layers occasionally stack faster than the emotional line can carry. The looseness is arguable rather than fatal. The slashers Schoenbrun is honoring were themselves ragged, overstuffed and inconsistent, and a film about loving inconsistent things has some claim on being one.
What holds is the nerve of the central proposition. Schoenbrun has now made three films about people formed by media that was never designed for them, and this is the funniest and the most physical of the three. It grants its characters the dignity of having been changed by something disreputable. What made you gets no vote on whether it deserved to.