Camp

The gradual gender-rebalancing of filmmaking has taken place in stages. First came the increase in female directors getting budgets large enough for the public to notice their work. Then came the increase in female leads, across genres, along with secondary characters who had more to do than just provide romantic interest, and villains who didn’t need to flirt. Now comes something else. Gradually, but significantly, we are seeing different types of storytelling, informed by different perspectives and life experiences. Sometimes one has to stop and remember how young cinema still is as an art form. This innovation isn’t simply a consequence of social difference. Rather, the conscious rejection of the male gaze marks one of few points at which it has really stepped back and taken stock of itself.

It’s interesting that much of this challenging new material comes from trans women, who often find themselves examining gender, too, from a fresh angle. Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb, made back in 2022, focused on a group of teenage girls engaged in a conscious attempt to understand their own nature and find new ways of living. Camp takes in some similar ideas but with slightly older characters who are less concerned with ideological purity and more aware of their own internal contradictions.

Emily (Zola Grimmer) is a deeply troubled heroine. Rather than being defined by the single traumatic incident so common in Hollywood narratives, she has to deal with two awful events, resulting in complex trauma deepened by an understandable (but probably unjustified) sense of guilt. Worried by her inability to shake it off and take control of her life, her father persuades her to take on a summer job as a counselor at a camp for kids who are recovering from their own traumatic experiences. Numb as she is, she goes along with it, realising only at the last minute that it’s designed as a Christian outreach project – but as it turns out, nobody there cares much about that except for supervisor Dan (Augustyn Van De Kamp), who is only in his twenties himself, rather sweet, and largely bereft of clue about what’s going on around him.

The tendency of male artists to depict girls as mysterious, ethereal creatures is far older than cinema. It has been variously subjected to challenge in the likes of Picnic At Hanging Rock and The Virgin Suicides, but Honeycomb and Camp do something slightly different, exploring the allure of such portrayals to girls themselves. It takes more effort to project such notions onto oneself, and to reconcile those idealised, transcendant images with bloody corporeal reality, but frameworks like modern witchcraft offer a means through which to do so, and where they don’t exist, girls are quite capable of inventing them.

Adopted into what seems to be a unique culture built atop fragments of occult law, Emily is given permission, quite outside the bounds of paternalistic Christianity, to free her spiritual self from its bonds, to reimagine herself without the burden of guilt. It’s a tremendously liberating experience, made all the more alluring by the apparently unconditional love that the other practitioners offer her. Of course, some viewers will immediately recognise this kind of love bombing as cultic in form. There is a real possibility of liberation here, but there is also the danger of escaping guilt only to fall into a different trap.

The setting, which Americans in particular will associate with carefree days, invites viewers to drift along with Emily’s experience until they too are enmeshed. The late night parties, drinking and revelry are for our benefit as much as hers. It’s easier to believe in magic by firelight. But are the powers that we see real? If so, what are the ethical bounds within which they might be used? What might seem like fantasy comes rushing back to contemporary relevance when one wonders how, when the old rules are bypassed, any kind of moral or social coherence might be maintained.

A thoughtful, subtly dangerous film which denies viewers the reassurance of a conventional ending, Camp will be completely illegible to some viewers, and is likely to produce much frustration. Open yourself to possibility, however, and its real magic will become apparent.

Reviewed on: 19 Apr 2026