What to Watch: "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma"

I’m coming to “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, in theaters) a few weeks after its theatrical release, which I now regret because the movie isn’t just one of the better entries of the year but also a great leap forward for filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun after the indie/Gen-Z splashes of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow.” Plus, the conversations around “Teenage Sex and Death” have been many and fierce, which is gratifying, because it’s the kind of film you want to (and need to) have conversations about. It is, as the kids say, a rich text.

What it’s not is another wink-wink meta-horror movie – God knows we’ve had enough of those. (Those want to scare you; this one wants to heal you.) Instead, Schoenbrun has reverse-engineered the genre to personal ends, with a great deal of humor, heart, clarity, sorrow, radical notions and goofball craziness. And they’ve gotten two remarkable performances from Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder, the former playing a cross between Norma Desmond and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in the original 1978 “Halloween” as well as the most recent installments) and the latter a stand-in for the director and a proxy for the audience in all our carnal quandaries.