Sometimes I don’t feel qualified to talk about this film because it stirred so many feelings in me and is composed of so many layers. So, let’s get to my impressions, my thoughts, based 100% on my feelings.
I wasn’t familiar with Jane Schoenbrun’s films. I went to the cinema unprepared, knowing only the synopsis. Of course, when I left the cinema, the film immediately became my hyperfocus, and I researched everything about it.
To begin with, the film stars Hannah Einbinder, who plays Kris, and Gillian Anderson, who plays Billy Preston. I’ve been following Gillian’s work for some time. I watched Sex Education, Hannibal, and was a fan of The Fall.
But, back to Camp Miasma…
This film brings together much of what I grew up watching.
First, the slasher, which has always been the genre I liked most within horror. Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho, Halloween… And I’d even extend that to the 90s and 2000s, including Cry Wolf, Final Destination, and so many others.
I know many of these films have major problematic themes. But sometimes, I feel like little Kris in front of the TV.
Because I also watched these films as a child, within my innocent and childlike imagination. And I liked the freedom they portrayed. The parties, the fun, the various friends together, high school, college. For me, as a child, that was all an imaginary world of what the adult world would be like.
And it seemed cool.
But there’s another layer in Camp Miasma that also took me back to childhood and, especially, adolescence: the old queer films from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
It was this cinema that formed part of my imagination. It began to awaken my sexuality, as a woman who was recognizing and discovering herself.
And Schoenbrun goes even further, bringing another love of mine for cinema: metalanguage.
It’s a film within a film. It’s a way of revering cinema itself. The film reel, the cinema as a physical space, and, above all, a screenwriter and director who wants to make a film, wants to tell her story, but has her creative freedom curtailed by agents and producers who aim for profit and the repetition of formulas that have worked before.
Camp Miasma brings so many references that it seems that each scene was designed to converse with something.
Starting with the opening.
The editing is extremely intelligent because, in a few minutes, it contextualizes exactly the universe that Camp Miasma wants to talk about. We see a franchise being exploited and saturated until it loses its own audience. It’s a very clear critique of what Kris calls “zombie intellectual properties”: sequels, prequels, continuations, spin-offs, the endless exploitation of the same universe.
As we see happening with Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Chucky, the Halloween franchise…
When Kris arrives at the camp that has become Billy’s home, the film’s atmosphere changes. And other references begin to appear.
I immediately think of Carol.
The snow. The Christmas tree. The glove. The atmosphere that slowly builds between those two women.
Until the preparation for that romantic night, to the sound of Sade’s Ordinary Love.
For me, that’s the peak of these references.
And the dialogues are also very intelligent. The film begins to reflect on the very way films are greenlit, on who can continue telling stories and who the industry decides to leave behind.
There’s a moment when they tell Kris that Billy could never star in the film again simply because he’s aged. And it’s impossible not to think about what this reveals about audiovisual media and the lack of older female protagonists, over 50, over 60 years old.
The soundtrack is another great success.
But, after all, how can I talk about a film where, for me, everything works?
Because I feel that Camp Miasma goes beyond creating reflections and debates about the film industry.
It touches on a much more intimate place.
On nostalgia for horror films. On nostalgia for queer films. On the memory of everything I watched and that, without realizing it, was shaping my imagination about cinema, about adult life, about freedom, desire, and about who I would become.
Perhaps that’s why this film affected me so deeply.
Because, somewhere, while I was watching Camp Miasma, I became that child again in front of the television.
And I feel that the child Julia, sitting in front of that screen, would have loved watching this film.
You can find Camp Miasma – Adolescence, Sex and Death in theaters.
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Until the next text.