‘Camp’ Can’t Quite See the Wood for the Tension

Avalon Fast’s “Camp” is an odd creature, being a film of promiscuous means and casual narrative focus. The picture is being distributed by an outfit that has made a specialty of art-house horror movies, Dark Sky Films, and has made the rounds of festivals dedicated to the genre. “Camp” is otherworldly, that’s for sure. But it could also be marketed as a coming-of-age story, fairy tale, feminist augury, trauma study, or an exegesis on the limits of Christianity. That “Camp” is campy almost goes without saying. Ms. Fast’s picture doesn’t bend genres if only because overtly doing so has become second nature to contemporary filmmakers. Which is not to say that doing so can’t achieve artistic rewards. “Camp” is ungainly in structure and more adolescent in tone than is wise for a movie about post-adolescence, but it does create an atmosphere of intimacy and transformation that isn’t easily shaken.Ms. Fast can’t shake it either. The director’s statement suggests an autobiographical component: “I used to tell this story . . . the one that took me somewhere deep and starless and left a mark I never knew how to heal.” “Girl Horror” is a peg Ms. Fast employs to describe her aesthetic, but she’s begun to worry that it might foster “gendering” and “exclusivity.” There’s a place in hell for those who foisted such terminology upon a generation, but take heart that one creative is beginning to intuit just how shackling ideology can be.“Camp” begins inauspiciously as Ms. Fast thumbs her nose at dramatic possibility by emphasizing cinematic artifice. After we see a sparkling pixie-like wraith seemingly poached from the depths of Lewis Carroll’s imagination, a character within “Camp” observes the film’s title card after which we are transported to a party of glum twenty-somethings all of whom move about their surroundings as if they were chess pieces. Very meta indeed. Then our director and screenwriter begins to tell a story.Emily (Zola Grimmer) is a young woman whose life is marked by two tragedies for which she is, if not legally culpable, then complicit. The guilt she harbors is sizable as are the bad habits she accrues to deal with it. Her father (Michael Tan), hoping to salve Emily’s psyche, sees to it that she takes on a job as counselor at a Christian summer camp for children with psychological problems. How truly Christian it is seems largely dependent on the faith of its director, Dan, played by Austin Van de Kamp.Otherwise, this summer retreat is rife with witchcraft, woodland spirits and a raft of enchantresses who wouldn’t be out of place in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Chief among them is the beguiling Clara (Alice Wordsworth), who becomes not only Emily’s confidant but her lover–at least I think that’s the case. The trend for all things lesbian seems more reflexive than the internal dynamics of fiction warrant. The men flitting around the perimeter of “Camp,” should you be curious, are abusers, dweebs and incompetents of no particular depth.Emily begins to come to terms with life even as Ms. Fast loses hold of her story. A Hallmark-like cupidity comes to the fore, as does a soupiness of intent that is only exacerbated by the spookhouse ambiance of Max Robin’s score. Still, there’s talent to burn in “Camp”: Mses. Grimmer and Wordsworth are certain to have a lot of work coming their way, and if Ms. Camp is a talent in need of discipline, she has a knack for movie-making. Good things come to she who waits. Let’s see where the horror girl goes from here.

‘Camp’ Can’t Quite See the Wood for the Tension

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