Cannes 2026: Gillian Anderson Romances Hannah Einbinder in ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

This new addition to their oeuvre opens up their world from cramped rooms and bright screens to vast landscapes and other-worldly dimensions. It’s a big swing, certainly, but one that also results in something messier, shaggier, and knottier than TV Glow. It’s guaranteed to be catnip for fans, just as it’s likely to alienate newcomers to Schoenbrun’s work, who may find their last project, strange though it is, more easily digestible than this one.

Whatever its flaws, the concept this time around is a compelling one. The film opens with a kind of Lynchian framing device—the sense that you’re watching a film within a film—after which we transition into a zippy opening credits sequence that sets up the premise: the Camp Miasma slasher movies were an ’80s touchstone, but after one too many pointless remakes, they seem to be dead and buried. That is, until a promising young director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is tasked with resurrecting the franchise with a fresh spin on the concept.

When we first meet her, she’s on her way to see Billy (Gillian Anderson), the very first Miasma movie’s captivating final girl who, it turns out, still lives on the hallucinatory abandoned set of the original film. It’s an eerie nightmare complete with giant painted backdrops and creaky old-school projectors, and Billy is the supremely glamorous Norma Desmond figure sitting among them and fading into obscurity.

With her purring Southern drawl and dreamy-eyed monologues, there’s a touch of Blanche DuBois to Billy, too, as she asks Kris to make herself at home, and Kris, in turn, pitches her the vision for the new Miasma. As a queer filmmaker, she’s fascinated by the original Miasma lore: the killer at its center, who is massacring teens at camp, wields a spear, wears a mask in the shape of an air vent and is named Little Death (memorably played here by TV Glow’s lead, Jack Haven). Once a trans teen freely exploring their gender identity, they morph into the feared creature living at the bottom of the nearby lake, ready to rise at a moment’s notice and unleash their vengeance. What does it mean, Kris wonders, for her to be reimagining this painful, highly problematic tale?