When a director makes a film about filmmaking, pay attention: it’s a sign that the movie, however grand or stylized it may be, is also deeply personal, tapping into the nerve center of the maker’s creative drive and self-image. That’s true of such movies as Clint Eastwood’s “White Hunter Black Heart,” Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” and the latest entry in the genre, Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” No less worthy than its predecessors, Schoenbrun’s film is indeed the richest of them in terms of the multiple dimensions of cinematic experience that it dramatizes, critiques, and illuminates.

This is Schoenbrun’s third dramatic feature as writer-director, and it marks a bold yet logical advance from the two that came before. In “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021), an adolescent girl gets drawn into a macabre online role-playing game; “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024) is about teen-agers who are obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-style series. “Teenage Sex and Death” is likewise a tale of media consumption—it revolves around a horror-movie franchise—but, in examining the fan experience, it also considers what goes into creating objects of fandom, including the emotional price that creators may end up paying. The result is a cinemanifesto, displaying Schoenbrun’s relationship to the art and a vision of a creative ideal.

The story is simple: Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), a critically acclaimed twenty-nine-year-old independent filmmaker, has been tapped by a studio to reboot a slasher franchise that was launched in the nineteen-eighties, with the film “Camp Miasma,” and gave rise to many sequels and spinoffs, an arcade game, a comic book, and a slew of merchandise. In its day, the franchise drew protests from the religious right, but lately it’s been criticized as transphobic. Kris, who identifies as queer and whose previous film included a reënactment of the famous murder scene in “Psycho” from the perspective of the shower curtain, has been hired to reconfigure the premise to reflect current sensibilities. As her agent (Sarah Sherman) puts it, the studio wants her to make it “elevated, a.k.a. woke.”

Kris’s interest in the job is more than just professional. She’s been obsessed with “Camp Miasma” since she was eight, especially with a character in the first installment, a teen-age camp counsellor called Squeak. Squeak was played by a young actress named Billy Presley (Amanda Fix), who refused roles in the sequels, never appeared in another movie, and has no public presence at all. While sketching out the studio reboot, Kris has made contact with Billy, now in her sixties (played by Gillian Anderson), who invites her to a remote compound in the Pacific Northwest where she lives in self-imposed isolation. The inevitable directorial dance of seduction to lure the reluctant actor to sign on to the project turns into an actual seduction, in ways that prove personally and artistically consequential for both women.

From this straightforward setup, Schoenbrun unleashes an outpouring of imagination and invention that places the film on a level of intricacy and extravagance comparable to that of Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Scenes from across the “Camp Miasma” franchise play as films within the film, realized in elaborate detail. The result is gleefully gory: one victim is cut in half at the waist, their legs still standing as blood spurts; another is impaled on a spear and shattered to mist against a tetherball pole. But these scenes are filmed with such playfulness that the shock value is completely dissipated. (I say this as a squeamish, gore-averse viewer.)

“Teenage Sex and Death” opens on the set of the original movie, as seen from the point of view of the killer, a figure known as Little Death (Jack Haven), whose most striking feature is a kind of helmet made from a cubic metal air vent, which masks the face behind a pattern of concentric squares and gives the character’s breathing a distinctive labored sound. The glimpse of “Camp Miasma” and its production functions as backstory for Kris’s trip, and sets the tone for the odd encounters that follow. At Kris’s hotel, the desk clerk turns out to be one of the locals who were recruited to act in “Camp Miasma, Part VI” (which Kris watches in her room), and it emerges that Billy’s compound, a former sleepaway camp, was the location for the shooting of “Camp Miasma.” Prowling the grounds, Kris finds a building labelled “cinema,” and inside is a projector with a film reel cued up to the scene in “Camp Miasma” that most captivates her—Little Death entering a room where Squeak is losing her virginity.

“Desire,” Kris writes in her notebook while watching “Part VI,” and it is Squeak’s mix of desire and terror in the first movie that makes Kris’s encounter with Billy so erotically charged. Kris’s partner, Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown), suspects that the reclusive Billy will resemble Norma Desmond, the delusional ex-star in “Sunset Boulevard,” but Billy (who’s well aware of the comparison) is funny, candid, insightful, and intensely sympathetic. She notes that Kris has been approaching her project “academically” and urges her to speak freely. Kris opens up about her sexual inhibitions while worrying that such candor is unprofessional. Billy responds that these personal revelations are intrinsically part of the work, and that their collaboration has already begun.

Much of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is a classic two-hander, sharply written with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine. For all the movie’s self-awareness, it’s filled with tenderness and humor. Einbinder endows Kris with pent-up intellectual energy awaiting explosive release, and Anderson’s Billy is a kaleidoscopic showcase of emotional vitality and natural, florid theatricality. Among the movie’s daring inspirations is the ample screen time given to movie-watching, whether by Kris alone or by her and Billy together. Each one of these viewing sessions is more than merely an opportunity for ingenious film-within-a-film evocations of “Camp Miasma.” They’re dramatic scenes punctuated by significant surprises: an accidental interruption, a trenchant observation, a raucous gag, a cathartic gaze. This built-in doubleness—of the watchers and the watched—lends “Teenage Sex and Death” a complexity that Schoenbrun amplifies in surreal, symbolic, and allegorical ways.

Throughout, Schoenbrun revels in the ambiguous fusion of artifice and realism. The foremost innovation is the evocation of Little Death’s perspective, by means of an unusual kind of camera movement—wavering and wandering, somewhere between smooth and jittery—which catches the viewer in the limbic system, going beyond disgust to the uncanny. The ostensibly transphobic element of “Camp Miasma” is that Little Death was gender-fluid, a cruelly bullied former camper whose killing sprees are displaced revenge. Schoenbrun, a trans filmmaker who explicitly addressed the trans experience in “I Saw the TV Glow,” here conceives something even more radical: a cinematic trans gaze, one that is visually distinctive in its tone while extruding violence endured into violent fantasy.

At the end of Kris’s time with Billy, she has to video-conference with a group of studio executives to give them a story outline for the reboot. Her pitch, deeply informed by Billy’s sensibility and ideas and by the course of their encounter, is a brilliantly strange narrative that puts the character and vantage point of Little Death at the center of a film-within-a-film origin story. The executives (deftly lampooned by actors including Dylan Baker and Jess McLeod) are predictably aghast. For Schoenbrun, though, Kris’s professional setback is an opportunity for her artistic and personal renewal, in the form of radical independence.

Alongside the fundamental dichotomy of the watchers and the watched, “Teenage Sex and Death” explores a related one—that of the director and the actor. As Kris and Billy view more and more of “Camp Miasma” together, Kris realizes that what she has always loved and feared about Billy’s performance in the original film comes from the real-life trauma and ecstasy that the actress experienced during its filming, which left her with a lifetime of material to work through (and to work with, too). Billy’s main creative outlet in her years of solitude has been visual art, and her work—abstractions dominated by the geometric forms of Little Death’s air-vent face—seems like a closed circuit of self-therapy. With Kris, Billy is delivered from these visual abstractions, just as Kris, with Billy, is freed from her intellectual ones. Together, each of them becomes both director and actor, observing and observed, controlling and controlled, self-motivated and mutually determined, launched into a higher plane of artistic collaboration—into a cinematic redemption. ♦