The cinema of writer/director Jane Schoenbrun is one of screens, both in terms of what they contain, and who, exactly, is meant to consume the contents. Their first narrative feature, 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was literal in this pursuit, largely taking place in the darkened bedroom of Casey, a lonely teenager falling head first down a rabbit hole of internet conspiracies and user-made Creepypasta videos. What she witnessed on that shimmering rectangle changed her, an internal reconfiguration that the unwitting heroine would come to share with the protagonist of 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow. Owen’s journey was quite different, an obsession with the fictional TV show The Pink Opaque leading to a testy, unspoken struggle with gender identity, but Schoenbrun’s concerns and central thesis remained bolted in place. What we watch changes us, and our observance changes it in turn, even, and perhaps especially, for those outside the intended audience.

Count Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), the filmmaking lead of Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, among their legion. Following the success of a critically lauded but commercially ignored student film, Kris has been hired to reimagine a long-dormant slasher franchise named Camp Miasma, and she’s hip to the cynicism involved in her selection. Queer, nebbish, and prone to overanalyzing, the upstart director is the perfect conduit through which to reboot a film saga that’s been labeled as problematic in the aftermath of its mid-80’s release. What the big wigs don’t know is that she’s actually a diehard fan, so determined to crack the screenplay code that she schedules a visit with the original film’s star, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). The former ingénue has been absent from the public eye since the original’s release, holed up in a cabin that just so happens to reside within Miasma’s dilapidated filming location. She’s got lots to say, and even more to teach.

And she does so with a truly wild southern drawl, an enormous actorly choice that pairs swimmingly with her other outlandish femme fatale signifiers. Hardly any of it makes sense in context, but Miasma isn’t the kind of movie that’s satisfied by only taking place on screen, forever unfurling behind it and to either side as well. Iconic is a term both over- and misused, but Anderson’s turn as Dana Scully on The X-Files, which stretched across 25 years and nearly 250 episodes, wholly fits the bill. Schoenbrun is well aware of her status as a counter-cultural sex symbol, and is eager to play with the imagery; in social media parlance, she’s already won Cinematic Mother of the Year. Her presence alone might have ensured that lofty honor, but Miasma throws a little Norma Desmond into the stew for good measure, and doesn’t mind telling you about it either. Sunset Boulevard is name-dropped early and often, along with a panoply of other film nerd references, all resting right on the movie’s surface. 

Most obvious among them is Friday the 13th, a franchise whose structure and aesthetic Miasma cribs and then distorts, but never to the point of being unrecognizable. That seems possible in the early goings, with Kris pontificating over the misogyny and transphobia of her favorite murderous serial as Billy’s eyes roll with abandon, but an extended, second act set piece moves the visceral viscera back to where it belongs. It takes place in Billy’s screening room, where our leads and the audience alike are treated to a print of the first Camp Miasma installment, a movie-within-a-movie gimmick that asks all involved to reconsider the bedrock text. Anachronisms run rampant, from a decelerated pace to the most inspired use of a Counting Crows song in celluloid history, but Schoenbrun isn’t after parody. Movies, along with every other kind of lived experience, are a fungible proposition, capable of shapeshifting under the right set of circumstances. Kris has seen the flick before, but never like this.

That sense of optical discovery is shared by the viewer, with Schoenbrun scaling up their patented Day-Glo, DIY world building in accordance with the film’s healthier production budget. No other movies look like this, a union of handmade tactility with ethereal, kaleidoscopic artifice that defies simple description. David Lynch is the easiest point of comparison, but not for any tangible kinship beyond their shared facility with dream logic. Likening the two only highlights their differences, pitting Matt Hyland and Brandon Tonner-Connolly’s color-wheel production design against the ill-intentioned niceties of Blue Velvet, the overwhelming lushness of Eric Yue’s camera work clashing with Mulholland Drive’s unnerving soft focus just as readily. Deeming Schoenbrun as an heir apparent misses the whole point of being an iconoclast, but maybe the pair’s affinity for deviance is clouding our judgement.

Because Miasma, like most Lynch projects, is completely obsessed with sex, and not in a subliminal way, either. Kris’ hang-ups and curiosities are ever front-and-center, Einbinder playing them with the coy disingenuousness of a 90s starlet who only needed to take off their glasses to silence a room. Her performance matches Anderson’s in its cheekiness and camp, but the desire is real, spoken to and then visualized with uncommon candor. A hot-and-bothered protagonist is nothing new, but Kris’ particular set of fetishes, which see her living vicariously through the helpless, objectified heroines of her favorite genre, go strikingly unjudged. If anything, Schoenbrun celebrates them, stuffing the screen with junk food and fried chicken to undergird their point. Sometimes the things that are most deleterious to our health are also the most delicious, and in case this point somehow misses its target, the killer here is named Little Death.

Sneaking in a French term to cinch your naughty bonafides is all in good fun, but if there’s a complaint to be levied against Miasma that isn’t purely prudish, the attacker’s moniker is a proper emblem. For a movie that argues in favor of puerile, intrinsic pleasures, this one is awfully stuck in its own head, and while Schoenbrun’s brain is an endlessly fascinating place to stay, all the academia does cut into the base delights that Miasma is championing. Then again, that’s the same tug-of-war that Kris, and Schoenbrun by extension, is fighting within herself, resulting in a film that leaves no small amount of contemplative residue on its audience as the credits roll. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma isn’t the kind of movie you watch as much as fall down into, tilting the world off its axes as World’s Fair and TV Glow did before it. There’s some repetition at play here, with Schoenbrun circling the same notions and preoccupations for a third time in a row, and we should all be so lucky. When you’re the single most distinctive voice in all of filmmaking, it’s best to give in, and keep burrowing down.