Review - CAMP
Starring Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Sophie Bawks-Smith. Written and directed by Avalon Fast. Unrated. 111 minutes. In theaters.
When Canadian writer-director Avalon Fast’s first feature “Honeycomb” played at the Boston Underground Film Festival in 2022, I called it “the most confident microbudget movie I’ve seen in some time.” The tale of five bored teenage girls living together in a cabin in the woods during the doldrums of a post-high school summer played like “Lord of the Flies” by way of “The Virgin Suicides.” I noted in my BUFF write-up that “what impresses are the striking tableaux in which Fast arranges the characters and her innovative, unconventional staging of the story. It’s one of those debuts that suffers from some technical hiccups but when you look at the colors and camera concepts you know you’re in the hands of a natural born filmmaker.”
Ditto for this prodigiously gifted director’s follow-up. The annoyingly all-caps “CAMP” explores some of the same ideas as “Honeycomb,” but to grander and occasionally inscrutable ends. It’s another movie about a secret world of young women, this one presenting an alluring and dangerous refuge from reality for our traumatized protagonist. We first meet Zola Grimmer’s mournful Emily during a darkly amusing party scene when she makes the mistake of answering a small-talk question too honestly. None of the chatty, half-trashed guests were expecting Emily to confess to hitting and killing a little kid with her car, and I assumed for a moment that she might be winding them up. No such luck.
Later that evening, another abrupt tragedy will befall our heroine, and the rest of the picture unspools in a hazy daze of guilt and grief. Emily’s well-meaning dad tries to help her get back into the swing of things by getting her a job at a summer camp for troubled children, which is maybe not the best idea, given her precarious mental state. (All the signage for the camp just says “CAMP” in capital letters, hence the title. This must be where the kids from “Repo Man” spent their summers.) But it doesn’t take long for us to realize that these counselors might be even more messed up than the campers, whom they mostly ignore.
These girls like to party, getting sloppy drunk and congregating in an off-limits attic, which becomes the staging area for an increasingly ornate series of occultish experiments on their foolishly horny male co-workers. If the gals aren’t quite full-fledged witches, they’re definitely witch-y, and Emily wrestles with the realization that the healing camaraderie of her new friend group is going to come with a cost.
Her ambivalence is reflected in the movie’s sometimes murky ambiguity. Fast isn’t a filmmaker overly concerned with making sure the audience understands everything that’s going on. Some critics have been rather bafflingly comparing this movie to “The Craft” – I guess because that was also about a young coven? – but its got far more in common with pictures like “Picinic at Hanging Rock” and Sofia Coppola’s aforementioned debut. “CAMP” is a dreamy, doomy mood piece, and the haunting atmosphere amply compensates for a few frustrating narrative ellipses.
Emily keeps losing track of time, with days on end disappearing in the attic. The film itself feels like it’s disassociating alongside her, scenes bleeding into each other in a sound bath of droning, fuzzy guitar feedback. Cinematographer Eily Sprungman makes these Alberta woods both inviting and foreboding, with digitally modified, incandescent night skies and twinkling starscapes out of a children’s book. Emily’s blank reveries are interrupted by startling, surreal images. My favorite was probably the ringing payphone in the middle of the misty forest primaeval. I watched this movie late at night and it gave me fucked up dreams.
“CAMP” opens in select theaters tomorrow and on Friday, July 3 at the Cape Ann Community Cinema.