By David Dent
For their third feature director Jane Schoenbrun builds on the successes of earlier more modestly budgeted movies We’re All Going to the World’s Fair from 2021 and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow for a more extravagantly mounted but no less conceptual queer homage to the slasher movie. And then some.
Kris (Hannah Einbender), a movie director whose presumably meta first feature was described as “Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain”, is hired for the reboot of the ‘Camp Miasma’ franchise, a series of films, depicted wittily in the movie’s opening, that started well, got bogged down with sequelitis and eventually ‘cancelled’. As an out filmmaker Kris is aware that her being chosen for this project is a cynical attempt on behalf of the money people to inject new life, and box office dollars, into a dead franchise for a new generation.
The movies are clearly based on the ‘Friday 13th’ films but also, in the shape of the franchise’s transgender killer, who for some reason wears an airvent on their head, the ‘Sleepaway Camp’ franchise. Kris clearly knows their onions about the slasher genre and expresses the desire (in so many ways) to work with the final girl of the ‘Camp Miasma’ series, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who lives a Norma Desmond reclusive life in the campsite location of the original movie, watching endless home movie reruns of her performances.
Kris’s arrival at Billy’s home, ostensibly to persuade the actress to return to the franchise, makes up the bulk of the film. The pair watch the original ‘Camp Miasma’ film together (lovingly recreated complete with aged film stock), Kris pointing out the transphobic elements and speaking film school jargon, while Billy sits back, amused.
But a growing attraction forms between the pair. Kris, whose sexual history remains complicated, meshes with Billy’s, who unhappily endured her own first (straight) sexual encounter while making the film. The pair gradually merge into a world where dream and reality remain blurred, while the killer’s reality becomes more focused.
Anyone who has seen Schoenbrun’s previous features will know that the director rarely provides any narrative easy answers, and TSaDaCM is no different. The film is largely set bound, the production design emphasising the fantasy elements of the movie, and the audience are teased as to what’s really happening. Slasher fans may be happy with the movie’s scenes of gore, unrealistic though they are, and devotees of the 80s will love the attention to detail in the film, saturated in the trappings of the genre. But Schoenbrun is aiming higher here, positing how Kris, growing up with her queerness, negotiates its complexities through film. There’s a lot to like in this but it’s a surprisingly dense work, and maybe one theme fewer may have worked more in its favour. It’s still an amazing feat though.
Bloody Flicks 