Teenage sex and death at Camp Miasma review: Gillian Anderson delivers a career-best performance

This summer’s boldest genre release reframes what a horror movie about desire can do for mainstream queer storytelling. Jane Schoenbrun’s latest feature uses a haunted summer camp as the setting for a tender, often erotic confrontation with loneliness and identity — and its resonance reaches beyond the festival circuit into how filmmakers depict queer intimacy on screen.

At the center of the film is a quietly compelling performance from Gillian Anderson as Billy Presley, the one-time “final girl” who never quite left the world that made her famous. Opposite her is Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an ambitious director attempting to revive the tarnished Camp Miasma franchise. Their chemistry carries the movie: it’s less about jump scares than about two people negotiating desire, memory and the myths that keep them small.

What the film does differently

Schoenbrun, who made waves with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, swaps internet-born dread for tactile, sensual cinema. The movie blends handcrafted animation, carefully lit practical sets and a soundtrack that often leans into slow-burning R&B — moments that feel designed to linger rather than startle.

Rather than framing its antagonist as a straightforward monster, the film treats the figure known as Little Death as a symbolic force: an expression of isolation, shame and the fear of intimacy. That choice reframes the narrative from a conventional reboot to a study of how trauma and fantasy can be mistaken for one another.

Scenes that might have been gratuitous in lesser hands are staged with restraint. The result is a movie that feels deliberately erotic without losing emotional texture: sex here becomes a language for healing and discovery, not just titillation.

Standout elements

• Performances: Anderson anchors the film with a layered turn as someone simultaneously worldly and arrested at adolescence; Einbinder gives Kris a nervous, hungry intelligence that fuels the film’s emotional stakes.
• Direction and themes: Schoenbrun deepens previous obsessions — solitude, identity, mediated reality — while opening a clearer path to intimacy and queer desire.
• Visual approach: The film alternates between grounded, lived-in camp locations and stylized, hand-drawn sequences that mirror Billy’s inner life.
• Soundtrack and tone: Music is used to shape mood and memory; the score often feels melancholic and sensuous rather than ominous.

The film’s pacing is deliberately uneven in a productive way: intimate, slow passages are punctuated by sudden, disorienting bursts. That structural unpredictability mirrors the characters’ interior shifts and prevents the story from settling into genre routine.

Why this matters now

Two developments make this film timely. First, it arrives amid a wider push for more authentic queer representation in mainstream genres; its insistence on portraying sexual pleasure as a form of personal recognition is rare in contemporary horror. Second, it signals a new phase for Schoenbrun’s career — moving from lo-fi, internet-rooted works to a more ambitious, formally rich cinema that still foregrounds emotional specificity.

For audiences, the film offers something practical as well as poetic: a portrayal of queer love that doesn’t reduce characters to trauma alone, and a template for how genre movies can explore intimacy without sacrificing suspense or style.

Quick reference

• Title: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
• Director: Jane Schoenbrun
• Leads: Gillian Anderson (Billy Presley), Hannah Einbinder (Kris)
• Key themes: desire, loneliness, myth-making, queer intimacy
• Release dates: August 7 (US), August 21 (UK)

There are risks: the film’s slow-building emotional logic will not satisfy viewers looking for a straightforward scare-fest. But in trading cheap shocks for psychological and sensual complexity, it stakes a claim as one of the year’s most interesting entries in queer cinema and genre filmmaking alike.

Seen through the prism of contemporary culture, this is more than a horror reboot. It’s a modest but potent argument that cinematic depictions of pleasure and fear can be interwoven without cheapening either. For viewers and filmmakers who care about how queer lives are portrayed on screen, the conversation it generates is worth the ticket price.