‘Teenage’ Kicks for Everyone but the Audience

What happens when an artist is self-referential about being self-referential? Is the upshot two negatives equalling a positive or does “meta,” as this kind of thing is called, fold in under itself once its incongruities have been squared? Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” is an immaculately contrived cornucopia of wink-winks and nod-nods, a conflagration of insiderisms so intensive that it’s a wonder the picture is being allowed to see the light of day or, rather, the dark of the theater.A character in the picture, a talent agent portrayed by the inestimable Sarah Sherman from “Saturday Night Live,” frets that her director client, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is too niche in artistic scope. Notwithstanding the popularity of slasher films like “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the Thirteenth” (1980), “Sleepaway Camp” (1983) and their innumerable sequels, knock-offs and reboots, most folks don’t find life’s meaning by plumbing their minutiae. Kris is obsessed with these movies; so, too, is director Jane Schoenbrun. The fictional and the factual are purposefully conflated in “Teenage Sex and Death.” The director is blunt about this: The movie “captures the fullness of my personality.” The new picture follows on the heels of previous efforts whose notices were more significant than their box office takes, “We’re All Going To The World’s Fair” (2021) and “I Saw The TV Glow” (2024). Profit isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality, but it is worth mooting why investors would want to pony up their dollars in the service of a filmmaker whose frame of reference is specialized to a fault.But pony up they do. The boutique streaming service Mubi, along with Plan B Entertainment and its CEO Brad Pitt, are producing and distributing this “meaningful exploration of desire, pleasure, and gender in genre filmmaking.” The catch here is Gillian Anderson, who lends name credibility to the marquee, as does Ms. Einbinder, who won an Emmy for her work on “Hacks.” The press release states that the movie was made “on a relatively shoestring budget,” that is if we believe the internet’s claim that $10-million qualifies as a shoestring. “Teenage Sex and Death” looks as if nothing in its production was stinted on. It is, in its own seamy way, a beautiful thing.Kris is a socially awkward indie filmmaker who has been tasked by some Hollywood bigwigs to reimagine a slasher movie franchise, “Camp Miasma.” The opening moments of the film offer a bravura montage of the ephemera that attends to a cultural phenomenon. Video cassettes, newspaper ads, collectibles and other geegaws, all of which have been fabricated with a loving eye for detail. How best to revitalize a series that has begun petering out every which way? Kris intends to do so by seeking out the original film’s final girl, the now considerably older Billy Presley (Ms. Anderson).For those not in the loop, “final girl” is a designation for the woman in a slasher film who is the last one left standing after this or that psychopath has made hay of everyone else in his murderous path. Billy became a recluse after the success of the original “Camp Miasma,” the implication being that she suffered from a trauma experienced on set. Nowadays the former star lives out in the woods at the revamped set of Camp Tivoli, the location featured in the movies that made her famous. Really though, you might as well call Ms. Anderson’s character Norma Desmond and be done with it since “Teenage Sex and Death” is an emphatically self-aware reimagining of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), up to and including a faded movie star seducing an on-the-edge striver. Whereupon follows a turn of events, some more extravagant than others, that are a kaleidoscopic mix of the post-Freudian, the post-modern and the post-PC. Convenience store candies, KFC, and an oh-so-symbolic riff on le petite mort lead to a blood soaked catharsis for Kris and Billy. All of which leaves the audience with little more than the unpalatable aftertaste of arrant indulgence.“Camp Miasma” is a treasure trove of obscurantism that will exhaust the select few scrabbling to find gold. Jane Schoenbrun has achieved fullness; let’s hope that does the director some good and that they next embark on a project that the rest of us can share in.

‘Teenage’ Kicks for Everyone but the Audience

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