★★★★
A big swing for Jane Schoenbrun, that mostly connects, in this phantasmagorical ride into slasher jouissance is a movie for anyone yearning for an orgasm of pure cinema.
Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature finds Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a 29-year-old Sundance wunderkind, coming fresh from critical success for her film Jouissance and handed writer-director duties on a reboot of the “Camp Miasma” franchise, a mix of Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, in an effort to launder the series’ transphobic past into something “elevated… AKA woke.”
The brief is a revisionist origin story for Little Death, the franchise’s lake-dwelling villain, whose head is, absurdly, an air vent. To crack it, Kris travels to meet the original film’s reclusive star, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), at her snowy Pacific Northwest home. That home turns out to be Camp Tivoli, the shooting location of the original Camp Miasma. As she picks Billy’s brains for inspiration she finds more than she was expecting: a way to tackle the biggest problem she has. No, not a new Little Death origin story, but her inability to get her rocks off. Will Kris manage to ride the wave of her dissociations, and achieve the petite mort she has so long been denied?
So far, so personal. Kris is a Sundance darling exactly as Schoenbrun was, and the theme of being at one with your body in ecstasy is a natural continuation of Schoenbrun’s ongoing investigation of how to be oneself.
As for that jouissance… in psychoanalytic theory, that means an overwhelming, transgressive pleasure. There is something sad and funny in building a reputation on a thing you have never felt. Anderson’s Billy gets the best line about it, “you remade Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain,” a dig at bloodless formalist remakes that the film seems half-afraid of becoming. Billy insists the original was never about the thematic seminar Kris turns up ready to deliver, it was always about flesh and fluids. Schoenbrun has called the whole thing a film about learning to stop dissociating during sex. Audiences should be aware that it’s not actually a slasher, but a psychological voyage that incorporates slasher imagery as fetish material. In that way it’s closer to In Fabric than it is to the films it references.
The first half is wonderful. Anderson drawls through playful monologues and has some choice dialogue about #MeToo (“I auditioned for The Burning, and you know who was behind that”, the unspoken answer, of course: Harvey Weinstein), proffers platters of KFC and endless packets of Jolly Ranchers. There are good gags about split diopters and an inordinate number of shots of dipping sauces. Saucy indeed.
Schoenbrun also provides some interesting parallels between giving yourself over to art and giving yourself to sexual pleasure. Kris’s tendency to point out cinematic techniques rather than just experience the ride is juxtaposed with her inability to switch off her overactive mind during sex. Provocatively, Schoenbrun even suggests that pointing out the fictional Camp Miasma’s transphobia (and by extension Sleepaway Camp’s own problematic record), or even James Bond’s record of sexual assault, is part of the same compulsion to analyse and judge that is causing her to disengage while fucking – both impulses blocking a transcendent communion that would be more rewarding.
Soon the reality of the film starts to collapse. The matte backdrops already had a joyful artifice to them, and now we enter a world of intruding reel sprockets, light bleeds, and video codec compression artefacts. Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the lake, Little Death awakens, and rises to surface complete with his killing spear.
In the latter half, ironically for a film about flesh and fluids, it loses a little juice: not so much running out of ideas as never quite bringing the ones it has to a full climax. While Schoenbrun centres the question of whether Kris is ever going to live in the moment and cum, some of the interesting side notions wander off for a long time unattended: the locals she recognises from their franchise bit parts, her agent asking how the pitch is going, and phone calls from her bi polyamorous girlfriend (Jasmin Savoy Brown, always great) and her himbo boyfriend Thor.
But with some strong gags and a superb Sade needle-drop, the central idea survives the slump: that giving yourself over to pleasure means switching off the part of you that narrates. What we are left with is an orgasm of pure cinema.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma played at SXSW London, and comes to cinemas in August