If, in some universe, Friday the 13th (1980), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Sunset Boulevard (1950) were to collide, we would probably end up with something very close to Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The path the director takes to present her ideas is complex and demands a great deal from the audience to establish a dialogue. At first glance, the film seems to speak to us through the conventions and clichés of the genre, but the story proposes something much deeper, brought to life through a daring and ingenious visual approach.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a young filmmaker working on her latest project. She has been hired by a major studio to revive a horror franchise that has long since seen its best days. Her relationship with the project goes beyond the professional, as she has a very special connection to the first film in the franchise, she is now tasked with relaunching. Kris becomes obsessed with recruiting the original film’s final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), and to do so she must travel to the remote place where the actress now lives in seclusion a location that happens to be the very camp where that first film was shot.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma achieves a perfect balance between form and substance. Its carefully crafted aesthetic and meticulous visual composition in every shot are in constant dialogue with Schoenbrun’s ideas and her decision to take the slasher and play with its traditional structure to rethink its metaphor of sexual repression and desire. In films like Friday the 13th and its derivatives, we had a formula built around a direct relationship between sex, pleasure, and death. The characters were punished for their sexual transgressions. This becomes a cornerstone for Kris’s character, which the director uses to develop her relationship with Billy.

Although the central pattern of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is built upon the conventions of exploitation horror, Schoenbrun uses them merely as a mechanism to question the way recurring themes in these films have traditionally been interpreted and to tell her own story one that explores sexual awakening, identity repression, and pleasure as a liberating force. Along the way, the film also nods to other essential works of cinema that fit remarkably well with what it is trying to achieve. It is impossible to look at Gillian Anderson’s Billy without thinking of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. And as we immerse ourselves in the obsession between Kris and Billy, watching these characters gradually merge through passion and sexual desire, it is impossible not to think of Lynch and Mulholland Drive. But what Schoenbrun does is not a gratuitous homage. Instead, she finds her own voice by using elements from these films to construct something that is uniquely hers.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a film that handles the language of cinema with remarkable precision. It possesses an overwhelming visual force and uses dark humor with great effectiveness to help maintain the rhythm of the narrative. It is a singular film in the way it blends different cinematic genres and in the way it develops its ideas without falling into cheap didacticism. A daring, uncomfortable, and profoundly cinematic work that deserves to become an instant cult classic.