The description of the new indie film CAMP—a young woman, healing from trauma, is sent to a Christian-tinged summer camp, where queer elements come into play—makes it sound like a certain type of movie that’s not unique. But the film is different and much better than you’d expect. This is a very assured work from young writer/director Avalon Fast, a Canadian filmmaker, still in her 20s. Fast is part of a loose collective of filmmakers, many of them queer and trans, who make what they call “Girl Horror.”
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is a young woman at least partially responsible for two major tragedies in her young life; most movies like this keep it to one. Depressed and living at home, her father decides to send her to a summer camp for troubled teens, where she’ll work as a counselor. Most movies about Christian summer camps have depicted them as oppressive and evil; CAMP instead takes another approach, showing the camp as ineffective, its leaders asleep at the switch. The camp’s incapable of stopping its employees from engaging in drinking, smoking, drugs, sex and witchcraft. This isn’t to say the film is especially sympathetic to Christianity, but But I’m a Cheerleader, it’s not. This also sounds like it could be the setup for an exploitation film about teen girls in trouble, but that’s not what it is, either.
There’s some bonding, but this isn’t a straight-line story of redemption or recovery. It’s a “trauma plot,” but not a conventional one. The film looks amazing, gorgeous and dream-like, thanks to the director, cinematographer Eily Sprungman, and Sofiya Iurkevych, the visual artist who Fast has credited in interviews. The cast’s very good, starting with lead actress Zola Grimmer, who’s making her feature debut. It’s been a year for movies by Canadian woman filmmakers, as CAMP joins Sophy Romvari's Blue Heron and Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, as well as movies about witchcraft, like Forbidden Fruits and a few others to come, including a Practical Magic sequel.
CAMP isn’t to be confused with the other movie called Camp, the one from 20 years ago with Anna Kendrick, although that title also utilized both definitions of “camp.” It’s also one of two first-rate movies this summer from a trans filmmaker with the word “camp” in the title, along with Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.