Jane Schoenbrun's highly anticipated third feature film, "Camp Miasma," made an outrageous debut at the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section, world-premiering as "Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma." The film, a queer slasher, received a six-minute standing ovation, with director Schoenbrun embracing stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson amidst roaring applause. While some audience members were audibly "vibing" with its narrative, others quickly exited the theater, cementing its status as a polarizing, yet destined for cult obsession, genre offering from Mubi.

The movie garnered significant laughter throughout its runtime for its biting critique of Hollywood reboot culture and major studios' attempts to infuse "woke" sensibilities into long-dormant franchise IP. The humor continued through its insanely over-the-top slasher sequences, leaving most actors drenched in blood. Schoenbrun opened the screening by quoting Drake, expressing disbelief and gratitude for the film's journey to Cannes, while Einbinder thanked collaborators for their heart and soul poured into the film, inviting the audience to a communal experience. Gillian Anderson also noted it was her first Cannes appearance, expressing pride in supporting the movie.

Mubi's synopsis describes the film as: "After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the 'Camp Miasma' slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original movie’s star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear and delirium." This narrative continues Schoenbrun's body of work, which Mubi noted prior to Cannes, is shaped by themes of trans identity and queer horror. The director, recognized as their generation's highest-profile trans filmmaker, imbues the movie with an enjoyably defiant spirit.

"Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma" is a delirious, accomplished, persuasive, and playful film, blending sex, death, VHS aesthetics, and junk food. It sublimes Schoenbrun's perennial questions around gender identity into a tribute to the slasher genre, simultaneously exploring the "frequently fucked-up nature of female desire" and serving as a manifesto for self-permission to feel such desires. The film is also a delightfully meta in-joke on the Hollywood studio machine, evidenced by Mila Matveeva's terrifically overstuffed opening credits sequence. This sequence takes viewers through the fictional "Camp Miasma" horror franchise's history, showcasing VHS covers, marketing materials, merchandising tie-ins, declining box office reports, and blogs detailing and attempting to reclaim the series from homophobia and transphobia.

The film's protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a "Sundance wunderkind" director (mirroring Schoenbrun's own acclaimed Sundance premieres for "We’re All Going to the World’s Fair" and "I Saw the TV Glow"), is tasked with helming the franchise reboot. She journeys to meet Billy Preston (played by Amanda Fix in flashbacks and a "silky, scrumptious" Gillian Anderson in the present), the reclusive star of the original film. Billy, who refused to return for the derided sequels, lives in semi-seclusion on the original movie's set, demonstrating a Norma Desmond-like fondness for turbans and dramatic entrances, despite rejecting the comparison.

Both Einbinder, in her first feature after her Emmy-winning role in "Hacks," and Anderson deliver superb performances, with Anderson's "self-consciously iconic Billy" providing many meme-able moments, such as her drawling offer of "dipping sauce" with KFC. The supporting cast is equally engaging, including Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor (as a punk DJ), Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker (as an insufferable studio exec), Jasmin Savoy Brown (as Kris' lover Mari), Quintessa Swindell, Kevin McDonald, Jack Haven, and Aren Buchholz (as Mari's hookup Thor). The overall mood on set, in front of and behind the camera, was one of enjoyment, maintaining a bouncy energy despite the gore and thematic complexity.

Visually and audibly, the film is a treat. Production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland created stylized interiors and lurid, artificial backdrops, featuring painted snow beneath a peachy purple twilight sky. The lighting often utilizes the "bluish-pinky palette" dubbed "bisexual lighting." Alex G's 80s-influenced score swirls in the background, complemented by cinematographer Eric K. Yue's playful homages to slasher tradition, including crash zooms, shaky P.O.V.-cams, recurring eyeball motifs, and split diopters, which even Kris enthusiastically points out. Contrapuntal music cuts, like an anti-melodic cover of REM's "Nightswimming" and Counting Crows' "Long December" accompanying a climactic bloodbath, add a constant kitschy pleasure.

The film delves into profound places, using slasher conventions to explore sexual confusion and erotic dysfunction, particularly as experienced by women. Kris, a self-proclaimed movie dork, intellectualizes her love for films and their unsavory aspects, struggling to surrender to embarrassing fantasies. The intergenerational incomprehension between Kris and Billy initially provides laughs, such as Billy's query, "What’s poly?" However, their connection deepens as they bond over unusually frank confessions of female sexual inadequacy, like Kris whispering "I’m just so bad at sex" and Billy recounting a disappointing loss of virginity. The older, more worldly Billy gradually inducts the younger Kris into accepting her own desires, leading to both orgasms and geysers of blood.

Schoenbrun masterfully crafts a love story that portrays a "fantasy safe harbor" where generationally different worldviews can coexist without judgment for the misogyny, transphobia, or other real-world problematic aspects of what turns individuals on. By smuggling trans allegories, voyeur theory, kink-positive feminism, and transgressive fantasy roleplay into the "candy wrapper" of a movie about remaking a deranged serial murderer film, Jane Schoenbrun achieves Kris's stated aim: "to beat Hollywood at its own game." Mubi will release "Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma" in U.S. theaters on August 7.