Jane Schoenbrun has taken an unflinching, idiosyncratic tack in their latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, turning the everyday awkwardness of unwanted or dissociative sex into a central source of dread and, ultimately, a fantasy for reclaiming pleasure and identity.
The slasher-inspired picture, which earned the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, follows a teenage character named Billy — portrayed by Amanda Fix — through a first sexual encounter that is verbally consented to but delivered with reluctance and emotional detachment. The film reframes that experience as a villainous presence equivalent to horror icons, asking why bad sex and dissociation are rarely treated as trauma worthy of narrative attention.
From cult experiments to a broader audience
Schoenbrun, 39, has long been associated with a cult cinematic sensibility: reference-rich, formally playful and willing to toy with genre conventions. Their earlier work, such as the well-regarded I Saw the TV Glow, established them as an experimental voice. With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun takes a more mainstream swing — working with higher-profile performers, including Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, and benefiting from an actual marketing budget — while preserving the intellectual and emotional density that defines their films.
The movie mixes campy gore and stoner-romcom beats with earnest interrogation of how queerness and identity affect erotic life. At its core is an argument about presence: that being fully located within one’s body and identity is a prerequisite for what Schoenbrun calls "learning how to have good sex." In interviews, the filmmaker has linked this to their own transition and the difficulty they experienced around sex when they were not yet living in an authentic self.
“about learning how to have good sex.”
That remark, delivered in context by Schoenbrun, captures the film’s dual appetite for provocation and pedagogy. The piece is an experimental love letter to ‘80s slasher schlock — the type of material that typically objectifies or erases queer bodies — yet it deliberately subverts those tropes by centring queer desire and the labour of becoming present to one’s sensations.
Structure, themes and consequences
The narrative threads together the experiences of Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder, a queer filmmaker who self-identifies as a prude and an intellectual. Through Kris and Billy’s arcs, the film examines dissociation, consent that isn’t fully embodied and how cultural scripts around sex can leave people alienated from pleasure.
Critics and commentators have noted how the film addresses a persistent but seldom-discussed subject: the difficulty some queer people encounter in reaching sexual fulfilment. Film critic Payton McCarty-Simas summarised part of the movie’s project as being about "how sometimes when you’re queer, it’s hard to get off," underscoring the film’s insistence that erotic life is entangled with identity, trauma and social expectations.
- Film: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
- Director: Jane Schoenbrun
- Notable cast: Amanda Fix, Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson
- Accolade: Queer Palm, Cannes Film Festival
A table of core elements may help readers quickly locate what the film offers:
| Element | Notes |
|---|---|
| Genre | Slasher homage / erotic thriller / stoner rom-com hybrid |
| Key themes | Dissociation, consent, queer sexuality, bodily presence |
| Aesthetic | Camp gore, reference-driven, experimental |
By reframing uncomfortable sexual encounters as a cinematic antagonist, Schoenbrun invites audiences to recognise how cultural and psychological forces can make intimacy feel unsafe. The film’s approach offers both critique and reclamation: it indicts the conditions that create dissociation while proposing that fantasy and pleasure can be tools for recovery and self-actualization.
For Canadian audiences and the broader international arthouse community, the film is notable for bringing trans-led perspectives further into mainstream festival discourse and for using genre forms to stage conversations about consent, gender and embodiment. Schoenbrun’s move toward higher-profile collaborators positions them to influence larger conversations about representation and sexual politics in genre cinema.
Whether viewers embrace its tonal leaps and formal gambits, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is likely to provoke discussion — about how film depicts erotic harm, about the potential for genre to nurture queer narratives, and about what it means to be present in one’s body when intimacy is on the line.
