Jane Schoenbrun does not make movies that explain themselves. Their latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, premiered Wednesday night in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section and promptly divided the room—before uniting it in a six-minute standing ovation. The film stars Hannah Einbinder as a camp counselor navigating desire and Gillian Anderson as something harder to categorize, and it operates less like a slasher than like a fever dream about what slashers mean to queer audiences who grew up watching them through their fingers.
The Schoenbrun method
After I Saw the TV Glow established Schoenbrun as American independent cinema's preeminent architect of trans allegory, expectations for their Cannes debut ran high. Camp Miasma meets those expectations sideways. The film is uproariously funny in stretches, blood-soaked in others, and abstract throughout. Critics at the Debussy Theatre described it as "confoundingly heady"—a phrase that would read as an insult for most genre fare but functions here as a mission statement. Schoenbrun has never been interested in giving audiences the catharsis they think they want; they're interested in making audiences interrogate why they wanted it.
Anderson and Einbinder go feral
Gillian Anderson, fresh off years of prestige television composure, arrives at Camp Miasma drenched in blood and unhinged in the best possible way. Einbinder, meanwhile, brings the deadpan timing that made her a standout on Hacks and redirects it toward something rawer. The two performers orbit each other like bodies caught in unstable gravity—sometimes comedic, sometimes erotic, often both. It's the kind of pairing that looks obvious in retrospect and inspired in the moment.
Un Certain Regard earns its name
The sidebar has long served as Cannes' laboratory for films too idiosyncratic for the main competition but too ambitious for midnight sections. Camp Miasma fits that brief precisely. It is not a crowd-pleaser in any conventional sense, and it will likely polarize audiences when it reaches wider release. But the ovation suggests something important: even a film designed to frustrate can earn affection if the frustration feels purposeful.
Our take
Schoenbrun is building a body of work that treats genre as a language for discussing identity, and Camp Miasma is their most confrontational sentence yet. The film will not be for everyone, and Schoenbrun would probably consider universal appeal a failure. What matters is that it exists—loudly, messily, unapologetically—in a festival landscape that often rewards polish over nerve. Cannes needed a film willing to make the audience uncomfortable. It got one.
