NZIFF Round Table Reviews: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

REVIEW | NZIFF |  ISSUE TEN | ISOLATION

This is part of a series of roundtable discussions and extended dialogues conducted by Ricky Lai (@rickthelai), Trevor Pronoso (@CleverGurl), Madeline Smith (@prime4illusion), and Caeden Tipler (@ctipler) on films that have premiered at NZIFF 2026.

The following exchange is between Ricky, Trevor, and Madeline on Jane Schoenbrun's latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

dir. Jane Schoenbrun

USA, 106 mins

Ricky: It's a comedy, that's no question, but the NZIFF crowd laughing at every odd mention of sex, genitals, orgasm, virginity, etc., really got on my nerves. As a staunch fanatic of the Schoenbrun Project, I have pretty mixed feelings on this one, to be honest; however, there are a few of my favourite movie moments of the year in here. I wonder if my general indifference was somewhat influenced by the audience's reaction.

An interview clip from Bryan Cranston about playing Hal in Malcolm in the Middle comes to mind, hopefully not too incongruously. Paraphrasing, but he says that you can't laugh during a funny performance, and playing it straight actually makes things funnier. One immediate problem I have with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is its constant winking at the audience. Some of it is welcome and funny, like the policeman whose face keeps recurring as an extra. More pointed lines accompanied by a clear pause for laughter, like 'I feel like there's a jumpscare coming,' felt like needless apologising over the material. Without those jokes it is an earnest, tender text about many things, like landfill pop culture and how a consumer can still feel an affinity with it (or feel 'seen' by it), or the generational issue with perceiving reality (and sex) through the lens of fiction, and the link between on-screen misogyny and harmful formative experiences of sex (resulting in the need to detach from your physical body). I feel as if essential beats, such as Kris taking off her clothes in the night as she finally runs from Little Death—living out the fantasy—would have been far more impactful in scares and humour had they been played sincerely, or if Einbinder hadn't been nudged towards such a giggly, knowing kind of performance. This is why, even if I was irritated by the crowd, it's not entirely their fault—the film undermines its genuinely profound moments with this constant need to let the audience know that it's in on the joke. The clearest example to me is the ending, which finds the perfect, doomed spot to conclude by cutting to black—Little Death scratches another tally mark on the wall (I gasped) then returns to the bottom of the lake (and we know what is down there now)—and then carries on for another ten or so minutes with an epilogue that swings the dial back to funny again.

I really liked one thing a lot, however: The long slaughter scene set to Counting Crows' 'A Long December' made me emotional for some bizarre reason, and I felt vindicated by the cut back to Kris crying. I remember being deeply moved by the final scene of Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), a rather unserious masterpiece, where the killer rear-ends her car into the back of a truck in slow motion before her head flies off, while the most beautiful piece of Morricone's score plays. This scene in Camp Miasma (both the film and the film-within-the-film) reminded me of that, this idea of being touched or 'seen' by a piece of art, sometimes a trashy and retrograde one, that never really had you in mind anyway. Kris wants to reclaim the Camp Miasma movies, projecting her awakening over what was only ever really 'flesh and fluids'. The slaughter scene we watch is meant to be from an '80s movie. Yet the gore effects we see are more like a Blumhouse picture—to say nothing of the Counting Crows song being from 1996—and this period disparity calls into question whether what Kris is seeing is really from the 'fictional' movie. Maybe it's what she thinks the new movie will look like, or maybe it's what she's projecting over the old one. Either way, it's euphoric. Kris says she's never seen the movie that way before, and it's quite remarkable that Schoenbrun trusts the audience will intuitively know what she means by looking at those uncanny images. Instead of looking through Little Death's point of view, we're looking right at their face—LD's helmet resembling a camera lens—and this must be Kris' projection, too, turning the gaze away from the retrograde characters and back towards the one figure she feels affinity for.

Madeline: Some of my feelings on this one have been coloured by my viewing of John Early's fantastic film Maddie's Secret (2025) this morning, which has some similarities in its reclamation of 'bad' film objects (in that film's case, the genre of made-for-TV melodrama films) and its aim to ride the lines between sincerity and irony. What I like more about that film is that it blends irony and sincerity seamlessly, rather than having sincere moments punctuated by ironic jabs, as you describe. It creates a world of parody and exaggeration that eventually asks you to take it seriously. As a result, it directly recreates that experience of becoming genuinely invested in something that is, on the surface, completely silly and trashy. That kind of identification is heavily discussed by the characters in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but not directly felt by the viewer in the same way, barring the aforementioned 'A Long December' sequence, which does have a much stronger affect in its simultaneous mix of liberation and trashy indulgence. The other 'film-within-a-film' scenes, while funny, tend to overemphasise the kind of laughs that distance you from that kind of emotional response. For instance, the transphobic exposition provided for Little Death is played as ridiculous as possible in a way that prevents it from being legitimately upsetting, like the reveal of Sleepaway Camp (1983). Would the film be a thornier and more interesting text if it were much nastier? I guess my feeling is that, for a film about the discomfort of finding emotional resonance and the desire to reclaim a text made out of contempt for you, the reclamation feels a bit too comfortable.

The film's tendency to separate its scenes into 'ironic' comedy scenes and 'serious' dramatic scenes (with the occasional comedic relief) is also reflected in how its many 'Themes' seem to play out side by side rather than being successfully woven together. This makes it more dramatically interesting and unpredictable in the moment than I Saw the TV Glow (2024), where the potential meanings of The Pink Opaque are all subordinated to the primary allegory in the second half. But I think it also makes it less satisfying to think back upon. The thread I find most interesting is the discussion of extratextual exploitation and how it's formally reproduced in the film. We can see fiction as a space where we can comfortably explore taboo and feelings that are 'bad' for us at a safe distance; when it comes to film, however, there can be more danger, given the medium's ability to reproduce exploitation through its indexicality. A Georges Bataille novel or a Suehiro Maruo manga may have more graphic content than what could ever legally be depicted in live-action film. But even if you think they're immoral, they don't have the power to expose a real person's exploitation to a mass audience in the same way. There are very extreme examples of this, such as Last Tango in Paris (1972). Although it has been extremely common in the industry that actresses get pressured into doing nude/sex scenes, there are some extremely concerning interviews about the actresses in Game of Thrones not being informed about exactly how much they'd have to do until it was too late to back out, and that's a series that has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people.

I think this context is a lot more significant in a moral evaluation of spectatorship than the 'problematic' content of scripts, and it certainly complicates the idea of a 'safe distance'. Schoenbrun alludes to the history of extratextual exploitation with a reference to The Burning (1981), the slasher film that kick-started Harvey Weinstein's career (and his history of sexually exploiting cast and crew members). More significantly, the key scene in the in-universe Camp Miasma that is responsible for Kris' sexual awakening and her troubled relationship to the film is revealed to have been a product of sexual exploitation—the intense look in Billy's eye that Kris is so intensely drawn to is from her dissociation from having to do the scene. I think Kris' fascination with that 'look' lies in its rupture of the real in a work that is otherwise so transparently ridiculous, even when she doesn't know the initial context. And the way Billy embraces the mythology of the filmic world to try and find some level of control in her exploitation is possibly Schoenbrun's most fascinating exploration of how we use fiction and media to self-actualise in ways that can be both liberating and entrapping. But after this scene, it feels like the film distances itself from these complications and returns to insisting that this is all play and that you can turn it off when you need to. Maybe I'm taking it the wrong way to think of these phrases as 'slogans' in the same way that "There is still time" is used in I Saw the TV Glow, and that Schoenbrun is deploying them in a more complicated or ironic way. Still, I do feel the full embrace of camp and play during the last 10 minutes seems to confirm this, leading to a disconnect from its full potential.

To sum it all up, that feeling of being a little too comfortable might be the main thing holding back Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for me. I'm always a little suspicious when I feel a film is trying very hard to appeal to me, and I'll say that it worked. I have issues with how the film's humour is deployed, though I laughed pretty often; I found the sex hot, and I found a lot to identify with in Kris' awkward cinephilia and her attempts to find a sexual expression that has previously been blocked by her trauma. I find a lot of resonance in the concept of having been profoundly impacted by 'problematic' texts at a young age and struggling to fully dismiss or repress them as an adult, leading to a process of negotiation. I certainly have no love for slasher films as a genre. But I do find the film very resonant with my relationship to anime and manga, and with my uneasy enjoyment of some of the more openly perverse works in those media (some of which I discovered at a similar age to Kris' when they first viewed the in-universe Camp Miasma). But as with I Saw the TV Glow, I wonder how much of this emotional impact is because of the film's actual qualities, and how much of it is just Schoenbrun throwing in a series of signifiers that will inevitably resonate with a built-in target audience (which I am very much a part of).

Trevor: Some unserious notes first on the encore screening I attended:

1) Screening started 20 minutes late. The projectionist straight-up skipped the Kāpiti advert that plays before the NZIFF opening credits.

2) The wonderful gay friend group I happened to sit beside was probably the only one laughing their asses off throughout most of the film, applauding as the end credits rolled and all that.

3) If I paid to see 106 minutes of a movie, I'm gonna stay put to see the whole 106 minutes of a movie. I was surprised to see my patience rewarded with a post-credits sequence featuring Patrick Fischler (the cashier) and Kevin McDonald (the motel receptionist/police officer) at the convenience store counter, joking about how "they're gonna make another one of these films, aren't they?"

4) If any of you get to meet Madeline in the future, she's a less annoying and more sociable version of Kris (love you Maddy <3 I can see why you relate to her a lot)

Madeline: Thank you so much, Trevor. I'm genuinely quite heartened to read that and glad to hear I'm not too annoying lmao.

Trevor: Very serious critique now:

I'm surprised not a lot of people who are critiquing this film's obscenely ironic, self-sabotaging tone (it's about as functional and profound as Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe") make the comparison to David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake (Patrick Fischler is also in that film). Both have such deeply narcissistic conceptions of the world whose protagonists are guided by their obsessions with pop culture and consumer products, that within their obsession exists a deeper conspiracy undergirding the coincidental/non-coincidental placement and proximity of these objects as leaving clues to understand the trajectory of their lives (and thus the trajectory of reality). "Someone planted this misogynistic horror movie in my childhood and now I have this unfulfilled desire to watch myself be raped and murdered like the characters in the movie," admits the kind of person Kris is. "Someone planted this misogynistic Marilyn Monroe movie in my childhood and now I have this unfulfilled desire to fuck blonde chicks like the Classical Hollywood debonairs of yesteryear," admits Andrew Garfield's Sam.

Nostalgia is the neurotoxin, and irony/metatextuality becomes its syringe, the ailments of most genre films within the last 30+ years. If Under the Silver Lake felt like an overlong contemporary Hollywood detective film (it's no Robert Altman, but the film can at least lament it should've been made 50+ years ago), Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma can't help but deny the self-contained genre conventions it gives itself and didactically mentions all the possible diversions it could've taken towards the audience. Such insecurities are built into their filmic experience, which means it's faultless, 'working-as-intended', ready-made. The film does all the pre-emptive thinking beforehand so the audience can sit back and relish in the pleasures of gory, unserious spectacle. It's no longer the case of Hollywood directors making westerns just to one-up their other director friends' previous westerns. A film made today has got to make character identification seamless; the director is the protagonist, who is also the audience, who sees themselves in the protagonist, who sees the mise-en-scène as stemming from the director, but not just the director solely but from other films the director likes who also sees themselves as the protagonists in those films, and hopes the audience too see themselves as these other protagonists, and thus finally themselves as the director.

I'd like to think making movies is the process of finding exceptions to yourself, seeing the limits of your personality and going beyond it, repeatedly questioning why you hold the positions you have now by subtracting yourself from reality and then forcefully reorienting yourself back in and recording the differences. It's part-scientific, part-poetic, part-dialectical. It's you against the world: a metacognitive realisation you can only reach by first distancing yourself from reality, and then saying "reality is not enough". We do not live in the best of possible worlds because the best possible world hasn't existed yet. Emphasis on the word 'yet', because art is a continual struggle towards 'ripping apart' the gaps of history and exposing its incompleteness, the nothingness of the cut/rupture, inferring the multiplicity of the universe.

So why the irony? Why treat genre as a supermarket where the spectator picks and chooses their favourite generic product and jettisons the rest? Why mince words and images to justify its affection for bad taste, for morally bankrupt, homophobic and transphobic slashers? Is the Freudian relationship between pleasure and death too inseparable? Will liking such films in public mean exacerbating their continued marginalisation? Is it a disservice to one's existential identity/political aspirations to make a straightforward (heterosexual) horror film? This film wouldn't reference all these other horror films if it didn't believe in their extratextual queer resonance. You can't a priori gender; there is no queer singularity that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma thinks its core demographic belongs to and strives to please. So why should the director make the conscious effort to overly identify with its protagonist if they don't plan on rebuking them, on denying oneself the narcissistic certainty of one's myopic perspective?

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has its protagonist desire to leave this world once and for all and wish to never return from it, only to realise that the world she glimpsed as a child and continually fetishises throughout their adulthood is compatible with the oppressive world we live in now. This is a conservative view of the world. The protagonist learned nothing because everything was there from the beginning and required no stretch of the imagination or creativity to find what she wanted. It's a delusion that I'm surprised queer people are receptive to, that all the pop culture detritus might as well be queer utopia manifest, that fast food and fucking DVD players are markers of identity. Billy assures queers that they too possess the bourgeois privilege of turning the TV off—of turning off reality—if it gets too difficult and unsatisfying. Why do you think the ultra-billionaires of the world splooge their decadent tastes all over the world, and then abandon their erected false idols and failed crypto-fascist, eugenicist dystopias once the masses start to realise they're paid for with their blood? Because this is all play to them. The prospect of being raped or murdered for daring to love someone is all play, a vulgar performance of gender à la Butler. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is afraid of death, but welcomes sex at the expense of death. Indentured servitude to pleasure (through capital) is the cyclical memento mori we have to accept and find solace in. Gooners gotta goon.

Kris wakes up and lives happily ever after with Billy, her obsessions confirmed and rewarded. A nihilistic viewer would cry irony, much like all the textual references throughout the film. I call it cowardice. The filmmaker sees their reflection in the magic mirror and says, 'I am the fairest of them all', and Snow White dies happily ever after.

Ricky: I think it is so interesting that you identified conservative undertones and/or the ideological cowardice in the conclusion of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I agree, and yet it is such a bizarre compromise from a filmmaker whose characters are so constantly yearning to transcend pre-established constraints of civilisation, even when the mediums of sub-reality its protagonists turn to (the Internet, television, films) run counterpoint. The film archly settles for this sub-reality and is underwhelming, really. But a week removed from first seeing it, I think, despite its facile (if not outright annoying) surfaces, the film finds some prevailing texture in the characterisation of Little Death as a sentient object of fiction. Schoenbrun's recurring interest in 'personifying' fictional characters—that is, making them aware of their bounds as fixed designs following fixed narratives—remains something that totally bowls me over emotionally, and perhaps the grief over what could've been and what could be at its core. It reminds me of similar ideas in Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower, around a boundless adolescent imagination trying (and just about dying) to defy the inherent bounds of fictional narrative and becoming disappointed accordingly; the loss of innocence correlates with realisation behind those boundaries, and in the case of movies, they are even industry-forged (e.g. market standards, product placement, appeasing shareholders). I suppose this gives the interminable industry-satire sketches some lasting significance; the Zoom call with Dylan Baker is at least funny.

While Kris obviously isn't an adolescent like Bianca in The Ice Tower, she has yet to fully realise adulthood, shown by predilection to process reality through the movies, her complacency in a polyamorous relationship she's only half-sure about, and ultimately her defensiveness towards sex; the 'flesh and fluids' of it, y'know. It's interesting that, besides Kris, the film also openly invites you to identify with the slasher villain. Little Death is a manifestation of the 'problematic' in pop culture; their backstory is a byproduct of reality's cruelty, and they are revived to play the villain's role again and again, even though they, in fact, long for freedom from that suppression. As Maddy mentioned before, the 'A Long December' scene suffuses blood-and-guts spectacle with something more emotionally tangible and true, and the lyric "And it's one more day up in the canyons" / "And it's one more night in Hollywood" gives the impression of somebody sighing before dusting their hands and getting back to work. "Ah, here we go again," almost. By staring Little Death in the face, we can watch them trapped in the role and sympathise with Kris' desperation to reclaim agency for who she sees as a victim of such suppression. Perhaps I am really just wishing the film committed to seeing this through; the constraints of allegory ironically limit that potential. As Jessica Rabbit says, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."