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

Reported by Vogue.

Jane Schoenbrun has built one of the most distinct cinematic universes working today — claustrophobic, queer, and deeply strange — and their latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which just premiered at Cannes, is the biggest swing yet. According to Vogue, the film expands Schoenbrun's world from the dim, screen-lit interiors of I Saw the TV Glow into vast landscapes and dimension-hopping unreality. The result is messier and more ambitious in equal measure.

The premise is a gift: Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer director tasked with resurrecting a dead slasher franchise called Miasma. To do it, she tracks down Billy — the original film's iconic final girl, now played by a purring, Southern-drawling Gillian Anderson — who has been living, fading and glamorous, on the abandoned set of the 1980s original like a horror-genre Norma Desmond with a hint of Blanche DuBois. The two women grow close over one strange, charged night, trading secrets and rewatching the film that made and haunted them both.

The Legacy Problem

At the franchise's center is Little Death (Jack Haven, returning from TV Glow) — a trans teen whose gender exploration was weaponized into monster mythology, now living beneath a lake and waiting. Kris's central question — what does it mean to resurrect something so painful and so problematic? — is where the film is sharpest. Schoenbrun's indictment of horror's long history of misogyny, exploitation, and transphobia lands with precision, and the analogue nostalgia (VHS tapes, intricate '80s merch, the ritual of rewatching a movie you already know by heart) is genuinely delightful.

The film is also dizzyingly cine-literate, stacked with Easter eggs from The Shining to Halloween, including the inspired detail that Kris's breakout film is a retelling of Psycho from the shower curtain's point of view. But that same genre fluency eventually starts to feel like weight — the knowingness tips into self-indulgence, the '80s flashback runs long, and a Zoom sequence lands with a thud. Unlike TV Glow, which maintained propulsive momentum, Miasma doesn't fully detonate until its final act, leaving the middle feeling undercooked relative to its outrageously good title.

This isn't Schoenbrun's tightest film, but it is proof that their vision is scaling in genuinely exciting directions — and if this is the rough draft of their blockbuster era, the final cut is going to be something to reckon with. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in cinemas August 7.

The most interesting directors working right now are the ones whose flaws are as bold as their ambitions.

Read the original at Vogue.