Camp, playing at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, is a cerebral fever dream meets student film as a young woman spirals at a religious camp. It delves into grief, sorrow, and belief tied to a question about repeated misfortune. To label it a slow burn is an understatement. Camp is an exploration of trauma and its effects that’s strange but struggles to grasp the viewer, and with an almost 2-hour runtime, that lack of memorability harms it. So it teeters between standing out and hiding out.
Written and directed by Avalon Fast (Honeycomb), the movie follows Emily, played by Zola Grimmer, a young woman cursed with misfortune. While trying to get past the pain of hitting someone while driving, she winds up losing a close friend who overdoses while doing drugs. After that, her father recommends she go to work at a religious summer camp for troubled youth. There, she meets a quartet of young women, and as they grow closer, strange things occur.
Camp Is Frenzied and Laidback
It’s an odd combination. However, Camp, when it delves into its dreamlike settings with obscure imagery and flashes of people or scenes, moves in a way that makes it difficult to grasp what’s happening. Outside of those moments, when it’s just scenes between the cast, there’s a lack of stakes and conflict.
While it’s clear something’s afoot, and whether Emily can move past her past is present, sometimes it seems as though it’s missing. It’s a less compelling blend between We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and The Babysitter. But most of the tension comes from audiences anticipating and recalling other films. Camp is more than a slow burn. Rather, it’s a snail-paced sizzle. Far too little of note happens; instead, it feels more like a journey through the good and bad.
Acting Feels More Stagey and Stilted
While it’s not all bad, the performances lack authenticity. Zola Grimmer’s acting, in particular, as Emily is wooden; even moments of joy, laughter, and tears feel miserable. Sometimes it gels with where she is emotionally because of all she’s gone through.However, at other times, it’s more an inability to find the emotional nuance. Camp would work better on a stage with a background displaying the flashing imagery. Alice Wordsworth (A Cowboy Against Thunder, Soul’s Road) as Clara exudes a matronly, leader vibe. Her performance brings life to the story.
Even the music that plays swells dramatically, moving with Emily and the audience through dreamlike sequences, nightmares, and reality. Often the music blends with the three, adding to the disconcertion of what’s real. It’s a lot, but it’s an interesting and strange film across the board. It’s fun music one moment, haunting the next, and strange another.
Camp raises a lot of questions that it does not answer. But it works for this film. There are cultish vibes and a middle finger up toward religion and its stranglehold on people. However, the movie dips into various themes of guilt, religion, witchcraft, forgiveness, and healing. Oddly, it works, but the Camp is a blend of chill followed by “wtf” moments and avoids concrete resolutions yet dimly resonates.
