TEENAGE SEX & DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Jane Schoenbrun's follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow opened Un Certain Regard at this year's Cannes and walked away with the Queer Palm, and it's easy to see why. Emmy-winner Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a Sundance-anointed young director handed the job of rebooting a fading '80s slasher franchise, Camp Miasma, for a more enlightened era. To crack the reboot, she seeks out Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive original "final girl," who still lives at the abandoned campground where the first film was shot. What starts as research turns into something much stranger: an obsessive, increasingly physical entanglement that pulls both women into the franchise's blood-soaked mythology, and into a reckoning with desire neither one saw coming.

Equal parts loving homage to Friday the 13th-era slasher cinema and deeply personal meditation on sex, gender, and the media that shapes us, this is Schoenbrun operating at full, unfiltered strength: funny, gory, sincere, and unmistakably theirs. With a supporting cast that includes Sarah Sherman, Jack Haven, Zach Cherry, and Patrick Fischler, and a script that never lets its horror-movie surface flatten the tenderness underneath, it's the kind of film that rewards a rewatch as much as it demands a first one.