Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) ‘Cannes’ Movie Review: Peeling Back the Fleshy Layers of Sexual Identity

With only three films under their belt, Jane Schoenbrun has not only found a distinctive area of auteurist concern building its way through each one, but has also managed to find three distinctive aesthetic styles through which to explore and deepen it. After the internet-brained creepypasta claustrophobia of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and the neon chalk-coated fuzz of ‘90s fandom in “I Saw the TV Glow,” Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” traces those horror fascinations even further back to the era of endless slasher series built on thrones shaped by piles and piles of dusty VHS tapes.

In replicating the scratchy grain of the “Inspired by Ed Gein” era of slasher cinema, Schoenbrun has nonetheless anchored themselves, as with all their films, to a viewpoint wholly and unequivocally modern: their own, and no one else’s. Exploring an era defined by images of scantily clad youthful bodies pierced and disemboweled by silent psychopaths emerging from the dark, the one image that persists in the director’s mind is that of the child watching it all happen on their living room floor at 3 AM, the images on the boxy TV forever burned into their retinas. 

If every one of Schoenbrun’s protagonists has, to a degree, been a version of the classic auteurist self-insert, then “Teenage Sex” brings that prospect to its most naked (pun only partially intended) representation yet in the form of directing wunderkind Kris (Hannah Einbinder). An up-and-coming film director tasked with rebooting the ever-expansive, totally-not-Friday-the-13th “Camp Miasma” franchise, the significance of this task is more urgent than any number of studio suits or shallow, Sarah Sherman-depicted agents could possibly fathom.

For Kris, “Camp Miasma” was her sexual awakening, and the opportunity to exorcise the long-discussed gender politics of a problematic franchise and recontextualize them as a form of queer empowerment basically constitutes, from an artistic perspective, her life’s calling. The key to unlocking this thematic significance, for Kris, is the inaugural “Camp Miasma” film’s reclusive final girl Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, complete with a full-on Dolly Parton drawl), and the opportunity to meet her idol all the way in her mountainous getaway proves too tantalizing a prospect to pass up.

This reads like the setup for a typical slasher film in and of itself—complete with a customary meta angle for the modern crowd, already beaten to death by focus group-driven studios—but for Schoenbrun, horror is never as simple as all that. Like all their films, “Teenage Sex” makes it clear very early on that, despite so vividly replicating the tone of their chosen era of horror, these are anything but outright horror films. The primary horror, as always, is the struggle of identity, and Schoebrun’s latest takes their most verbose route yet as they frantically dig below the surface of the lake to find what it is that’s lying in wait to come out.

But just because subtext is verbalized, that doesn’t make it easy to parse out, and Schoenbrun’s incredibly direct interrogation of how cinema has shaped their sexual awakening proves dense and almost impenetrable to anybody on the outside; if “I Saw the TV Glow” wore its allegory on transness pretty directly on its sleeve, parsing out exactly how “Teenage Sex” relates to the same subject proves somewhat more mystifying. Not that this is to the film’s detriment, as that mystique is very much part of the appeal created by Schoenbrun’s kitschy externalization of the melding between fact and fiction, voyeur and target, film grain and CGI, sleep and awakening.

Nowhere is this blending more apparent than in a sequence that finds Kris imagining the first-person perspective of the square-headed Little Death (“Camp Miasma”’s Jason Voorhees) rampaging through his long line of victims, the grain of a ‘70s slasher suddenly giving way to the most gloriously jarring streams of computer-generated blood spurts and rubbery ragdoll physics imaginable. For all of Kris’s endless recognition of problematic depictions of gender and the grotesque and her easy identification of split diopters, none of it proves as real as the tiniest moment spent on the outside, looking at her own tender flesh ready for the spear and seeing her own scream of horror becoming one of orgasmic elation.

Essentially the closest thing we’ll ever get to Schoenbrun’s take on a Charlie Kaufman film—somewhere on the spectrum between the endlessly self-reflexive “Adaptation.” and the internalized, stream-of-consciousness horrors of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”—the director’s third feature actually finds in that probing self-consciousness a jovial disposition that was notably absent in their previous efforts to externalize the pain of a life constantly questioned, not least of all by itself. With “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” Schoenbrun is clearly more comfortable in their own skin than ever before, and if the most effective way for them to show that bleeding heart to the audience is to cut it out and serve it on a polished platter, then they’re more than willing to do so with a smile, a laugh and a handful of gummy candies.

Read More: Butterfly Jam (2026) ‘Cannes’ Movie Review: Kantemir Balagov’s Uncharacteristically Slight Depiction of Unusual Diasporic Tenderness

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd

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