Grief clings to us like smoke; no matter how far we walk, its scent lingers.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) knows this too well. At 16, she struck and killed a young girl who ran in front of her car. Years later, after confessing the story during a late-night game of truth or date, she watches her best friend overdose beside her--and the spiral begins again. "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," as Emily Dickinson once wrote. CAMP lingers in this unbearable aftershock.
With her sophomore feature, emerging director Avalon Fast cements herself as one of the most daring young voices in indie horror. Premiering yesterday at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival after winning the Next Wave Award at Fantastic Fest, CAMP unfolds with a fearless sense of interiority, an ethereal horror about young women--a found family in the face of grief--and the magic they create to survive.
Emily, unsurprisingly, sinks into the depths of depression. Her father (Michael Tan) urges her to work as a camp counselor, believing that guiding troubled kids might quiet the turmoil in her own head. She heads out West on a train, discovering the camp is a devout Christian camp. On the train ride, Fast injects a dreaminess into its narrative. At first, the changes are subtle -- iridescent northern lights, shooting stars streaking by -- until, at last, the shimmering sky might engulf the girls.
Upon arrival, Emily's unease about the presence of Jesus Christ dissipates; her fellow counselors, it turns out, couldn't care less. In fact, the group of young women who embrace Emily -- played by Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Sophie Bawks-Smith -- dabble in the sacrilegious.
Fast delivers this mysticism with a deft hand, where we learn alongside Emily just how much magic is real. This camp clique invites Emily to their secret hideout, an abandoned attic, where the girls meet, drink wine, and "put their wishes into the universe."
Clara (Wordsworth) makes one caveat: "Sounds middle school, I know, but when I tell you it works, it works." Another girl wishes for her family to take her back, a wish disregarded as "boring." Instead, she wishes to sleep with the devout camp leader, Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp). When she does take his virginity, the girls see it as a sacrifice, something to fuel their power.
Emily's wish, however, is simple: to feel good; to shed her grief. This is her arc. The summer camp becomes a kind of purgatory, where she tries to distract herself from her trauma but remains tethered to it. From her wish onward, CAMP's coming-of-age narrative slips into something far more magnificent. Fast weaves us in and out of dreams and reality, mirroring the uncertainty in how Emily grapples with her grief. All the while, Emily finds solace and transformation in an intimate, coven-like circle of friends.
Fast's command of ethereal storytelling is remarkable. As Emily is consumed by grief, wrestling with its shape, the film drifts from her fraught relationship with the troubled teen Eden (Izza Jarvis) into séances and spectral encounters. It could easily flatline, yet this surreal story pulls us under to reveal something richer: a portrait of healing, of early adulthood haunted by a wounded youth, and of solace found in enduring femme friendship.
In this way, CAMP (predictably) falls into a cinematic tradition alongside perhaps the most beloved teen-witchcraft film The Craft (1996) -- the parallels are undeniable. But Fast uncovers something new.
Her confidence as a filmmaker lies in her refusal to waver from a lavish vision, one bolstered by Max Robin's devouring score and Eily Sprungman's razor-sharp cinematography. Even her inclusion of animation, often reminiscent of the playful, ardent animations in Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (1977) or School in the Crosshairs (1981), proves her control as a filmmaker, not once feeling indulgent, but always necessary.
Even when CAMP channels this exuberance, it never trivializes the reality of Emily's grief. At every turn, Fast sharpens the ache of grief. This intense dissection of loss and healing is upheld largely by a cast capably towing the line between potent sincerity and uncanny distance. As Emily and her friends edge closer, the film finds subtlety in their shared fractures. All of this is guided by Grimmer's remarkably poised and empathetic debut performance.
Spellbound by grief, Emily and her new friends nurture a space of their own, carved out from a world that offers little room for recovery. For those who've felt the depths of loss, the mind becomes its own inferno, a fog where even the self is hard to find.
Fast's film draws us into this haze and unravels the divine contradictions of mourning, a duality put plainly by one of the girls: "God brought me to the devil and my closest friends."
The film screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.