Permeated with a queer atmosphere and suffused with a delightfully ambiguous sensibility, Avalon Fast's superbly accomplished Canadian film Camp is a low-budget effort that utilizes several familiar horror tropes without completely falling into them. Creepy, yet more seductive than terrifying, the film is fascinated less by its demons than by the process of transformation through which a (self-)tormented young woman can transform them into grace.
Camp may begin with a premise that seems perfect for a Midsommar-style PTSD mashup, but the Honeycomb director's second feature—shot at a Tim Hortons soccer camp in the Alberta woods and unfolding at a spiritual crossroads between Panos Cosmatos, Louise Weird, and Jane Schoenbrun, whose Teen Sex and Death at Camp Miasma could have been this film's long-lost older sister—soon breaks free of the gendered expectations of a straightforward genre plot. Teen sex and/or early twenties sex are on the menu, but only as two key ingredients Fast needs to create a misty forest landscape where power is granted through human sacrifice, the moon cries tears into a lake at night, and even the most tormented people can find the strength to escape their pain.
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If Emily can do it, anyone can. Newcomer Zola Grimmer delivers a raw, penetrating realism that shifts with the film's shifting tone (scenes can veer between Omnes-esque irony and hyper-vivid sincerity). Emily is just beginning to heal from the worst wound of her life when Camp rips it open twice as deep in its opening minutes. It begins, like so many terrible nights, with a game of truth or dare at a dreary house party. When Emily chooses truth or dare, someone asks her what her biggest regret is. "Have you ever gotten a bad haircut or slept with your friend's ex?" Hee hee hee and all that. Whether intentionally misreading the situation and/or desperately hoping for some much-needed peer support, Emily confesses that—through no fault of her own—she fatally hit a small child with her car several years ago. The party was awful. Awkward glances. What a weirdo.
One of the girls suggests this isn't the right place for such a thing—that Emily should talk to a professional, as if that would be helpful. Emily runs home with her best friend, Charlie, and a few bags of cocaine, but as soon as they hit the road, Charlie dies of an overdose (presumably caused by fentanyl) in the passenger seat. Emily was already the most guilty of all the college dropouts in Western Canada. Now she feels like a serial killer.
When Emily's father recommends her for a job as a counselor at a summer camp for kids with disabilities, she has no choice but to accept. She's either the worst candidate for the job or uniquely qualified to excel, and there's only one way to find out. We never find out. While the kids eventually show up (one even gets her first period under Emily's watchful eye), they mostly drift in and out of the film like white noise, as Fast prefers to focus on the peculiar bond Emily develops with the other counselors—a group of "gorgeous weirdos" who wander the woods like joyful goths.
Rosie (Cherry Moore) teases the "hot, uninhibited energy of summer" and casually drops the fact that she once had a child of her own, as if enjoying the safety of a place where no one would consider such information essential to their friendship. Nev (Leah Rose Sebastianis) fantasizes about sex with the ultra-Christian camp counselor Dan (Austin Van de Kamp), not so much out of lust as out of a desire to surrender her virginity to darkness. Jo (Sophie Box-Smith) seems to sense an unseen force, and Clara (Alice Wordsworth) resembles Emily enough to hint at their similarity; the film stokes the pent-up sexual tension between them, but only to the point that Emily finds herself drawn into self-flagellation as she gazes into the moonlight, searching for a way to atone for her guilt.
All of these girls know what it's like to be lost, and Camp so completely trusts what its characters find in each other that it ignores any other avenues of orientation. By omitting the specific questions its premise seems to raise (What is the counselors' connection to the occult? Why are the campers traumatized? Is the camp itself rooted in a shameful or sinister past?), the film asserts its queer identity by seeking more unconventional ways to find peace for Emily's soul—not therapy, not Jesus, and certainly not that creepy boy she meets around the campfire one night. Camp even goes out of its way to reject, or at least sidestep, the idea that killing men could be a viable way for women to reclaim their power, as Fast's interests focus solely on the sisterhood Emily shares with her coworkers (who are always kind to each other, even in the face of violence).
It's the spectral nature of this sisterhood, and the way Fast and her co-writers eloquently imbue Emily's deepest guilt with it, that fuels the film's monotonous appeal. The awkward and lifeless, yet disarmingly simple, dialogue strips away the film's surface, forcing the viewer to focus on its abstract strengths, as if Fast offers Camp's superficial amateurism as a kind of blood sacrifice to prime the audience for the more visceral power of its moods.
As homemade as the film may seem at first, it soon becomes clear that cinematographer Eili Sprungman is a true master of her craft. The film's glossy clarity of "normality" blurs into a soft, enchanted blur as Emily begins to feel at home in her coven. By the end, even something as natural as daylight is filled with a heavenly glow, and the beads of sweat on her dying body sparkle with a beauty Emily could never find anywhere else in her tragic life.
Equipped with Max Rubin's sparse, reverb-laden synth and guitar score (reminiscent of Alex G's scores for Schönbrun's films, at least in the fugue-like state of self-discovery it creates in a world of white noise), Fast's visuals rely on a hypnotic network of dense gels, swirling fog, and gorgeous bursts of animation to reforge the most horrific moments of Emily's life into a viable path to forgiveness. To the same clearing where God once led Clara to the devil, so that the devil could lead her to her closest friends—the only people capable of returning her to herself. This boldly conceived, vividly textured, and incredibly resonant work of economical witchcraft is propelled forward by its hypnotic belief in the chosen path of healing for a person who should never have felt so broken.
Rating: B+
Dark Sky Films will release "Camp" in theaters on Friday, June 26.
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