Cannes Film Festival

Film and Media

Entertainment with "Teenage, Sex and Death at Camp Miasma"

The Un certain regard section featured the new film by Jane Schoenbrun, a strongly metacinematographic project

by Andrea Chimento

15 May 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Gender cinema is in the spotlight at the Cannes Film Festival: the Un Certain Regard section featured "Teenage, Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" by Jane Schoenbrun, a director who had already amazed with her previous "I Saw TV Shine" two years ago.

The protagonist of this new project is a film author called upon to resurrect a horror saga entitled 'Camp Miasma'.

In order to achieve his goal, he will visit the actress starring in the first film of the franchise: the latter has been living for years isolated from the world and now completely outside the logic of big screen productions, and the encounter with the young director will give rise to decidedly unpredictable situations.

Right from the plot, one immediately perceives how 'Teenage, Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' is a strongly meta-cinematic product and an explicit homage to the slasher horror cinema of the early 1980s: moving from the "Friday the 13th" saga to citations to David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" (but also to Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece "Sunset Boulevard"), this film continually winks at fans of genre cinema, reaching in this sense some profoundly visionary heights that find fulfilment especially towards the film's concluding part.

Compared to his previous feature films, Schoenbrun takes himself less seriously in his overall tone, but manages to really think deeply about the issues of contemporary political correctness and the acceptance of one's sexuality.

An imperfect but courageous film

The idea of reinterpreting that type of genre cinema in a queer key is courageous and the messages proposed are never didactic or forced, thus managing to offer a product that is both intelligent and entertaining.

There is no shortage of imperfections, starting with some overly verbose dialogue and some sequences that could have been even more creatively pushed, but the overall design is nonetheless striking, thanks also to some insights into the concept of desire - sexual, certainly, but also cinematic - that are anything but banal and capable of generating more than one interpretation.

Also noteworthy is the work of the two lead actresses Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in this feature film that could become one of the most talked-about cult-movies in the months following this year's Cannes Film Festival;

Nagi Notes

Nagi Notes and La vie d'une femme

Decidedly more conventional were the first two titles presented in the competition, the Japanese 'Nagi Notes' and the French 'La vie d'une femme'.

The first, directed by Koji Fukada, is about a woman freshly divorced who arrives in the small town of Nagi to visit her former sister-in-law, an artist to whom she promises to model a sculpture.

Fukada had done better with 'Harmonium' and 'Love Life', and in this case he directs a rather innocuous drama that takes a long time to get going: the second half, where a possible elopement between two young boys is shown, is on the rise, but apart from the Japanese director's refined style, there is very little left to think about at the end of the viewing.

More effective is 'La vie d'une femme' by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, centred on a middle-aged woman consumed by her work as a surgeon and a series of private situations that are not easy to handle.

Divided into numerous short chapters, it is an extremely realistic product, capable here and there of arousing emotion, but it is also at the same time a film that tastes very much like it has already been seen and is the victim of a few unbelievable twists and turns. Very good, in any case, the protagonist Léa Drucker, undoubtedly among the possible candidates for the Palme for Best Actress.