Holy fuckin smokes. To call Avalon Fast’s newest film “dreamy” would be an understatement. This movie feels like a smear of time and space in a way that so few movies do. And for a film this seeped in vibes, it’s a total and complete structural palindrome or something. Like an absolute and cohesive container of witchy sexy sisterhood druggie holy hell. I hesitant to put much words to the question lot before so many get to see this…all I’ll say is it captures grief, growing, and the grief of growing so beautifully and sincerely. A movie that feels like summer ending and autumn beginning, losing so many people and gaining so many more, and soaking in the light of God by absolutely succumbing to the fire of the Devil.It is no exaggeration that this has some of the most gorgeous cinematography i’ve seen in a movie in fucking years. DP Eily Sprungman is clearly working with some sort of fucking dark magic on this one. Adored all of the performances in this, but the phenomenal standouts: Zola Grimmer, Lea Rose Sebastianis (i mean maybe my favorite actor doing stuff right now tbh), Ella Reece, and Aidan Laudersmith. The FX were so pretty and restrained…like there’s such a magic to how *not* over the top it is, while feeling hyper real. like truly aspirational. going to be ripping this movie off in my next one lol.The world is a better place with Avalon Fast making movies. Just a brilliant and true soul putting real magic into her art. See this as soon as you can.
Ambiently queer and awash in rapturously uncertain feeling, Avalon Fast’s ultra-accomplished “Camp” is a micro-budget Canadian movie that invokes a handful of recognizable horror tropes without ever succumbing to the mode altogether. Eerie in a way that feels more seductive than scary, the film isn’t bewitched by its demons so much as the process of transubstantiation by which a (self)tortured young woman can transform them into grace. “Camp” might begin with a premise that seems ready-made for some post-horror trauma fun in the vein of “Midsommar,” but the “Honeycomb” director’s second feature — shot at a Tim Horton soccer camp in the forests of Alberta, and set at the spiritual crossroads between Panos Cosmatos, Louise Weard, and Jane Schoenbrun, whose “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” could be cast as this movie’s long-lost older sister — soon unmoors itself from the gendered expectations of a legible genre plot. Teenage and/or early twentysomething sex and death are both on the menu, but only as two of the key ingredients Fast needs to conjure a hazy woodland dreamscape where strength is endowed through human sacrifice, the moon cries tears into the lake at night, and even the most haunted of people might find the power to take flight of their pain. If Emily can do it, anyone can. Played by newcomer Zola Grimmer, who inhabits the role with a raw and searching realness that shifts to accommodate this movie’s quicksilver tone (scenes are liable to pingpong between Omnes-like archness and hyper-vivid sincerity), Emily is just starting to heal from the worst hurt of her life when “Camp” rips the wound open twice as wide in its opening minutes. It starts, as many terrible nights do, with a game of truth-or-dare at a moribund house party. When Emily opts for the former, someone asks her to name her biggest regret. Did you ever get a bad haircut or hook up with your friend’s ex? Tee-hee-hee and whatnot. Willfully misreading the vibe and/or desperately hoping for some much-needed support from her peers, Emily confesses that — by no fault of her own — she hit and killed a little kid with her car a few years earlier. Party foul. Awkward glances. What a freak.One girl suggests that this isn’t the right place for that kind of thing — that Emily should talk to a professional, as if that might be a helpful piece of advice. Emily bails with her best friend Charlie and a few baggies of cocaine for the car ride home, but they’re barely on the road before Charlie dies of a (presumably fentanyl-induced) overdose in the passenger seat. Emily was already the guiltiest college dropout in all of Western Canada. Now she feels like a serial killer. When her dad recommends Emily for a job as a counselor at a sleepaway camp for damaged kids, she has no choice but to accept the opportunity. She’s either the worst possible candidate for the job or uniquely well-qualified to knock it out of the park, and there’s only one way to find out. We never really do. While campers do eventually show up (one of them even has their first period under Emily’s watch), they mostly flitter in and out of the movie like white noise, as Fast prefers to focus on the coven-like bond that Emily develops with the other counselors — a group of “gorgeous weirdos” who swan around the woods like joyful goths.Rosie (Cherry Moore) teases the “hot and loose energy of the summer” and casually slips into conversation that she had a kid of her own once, as if exalting in the safety of a place where no one would find that information relevant to their friendship. Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) fantasizes about fucking ultra-Christian camp leader Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp), less out of lust than a desire to offer his virginity to the darkness. Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith) seems to be in tune with an unseen force, while Clara (Alice Wordsworth) resembles Emily just enough to suggest her doppelganger; the movie kindles the underplayed sexual tension between them, but only so far as it foists Emily back upon herself as she looks into the moonlight for a way to absolve her guilt.~this review continues on IndieWire~
