CAMP had its world première at Fantastic Fest 2025, 21st Sept
In the impressionistic, home video-like opening sequence, part-monochrome, part-colour, of Avalon Fast’s CAMP, a 16-year-old woman is driving along the road in the half light of dusk. A song by the film’s composer Max Robin plays on the soundtrack, setting a whimsical if fey tone with its repeated, melancholic lyric “you will never see me again” – and indeed happy-go-lucky Emily’s life is about to change forever when a four-year-old girl runs into the path of her car and is killed.
A few years later, just as Emily (Zola Grimmer) is glimpsing something akin to rehabilitation, there is a second tragic death in her immediate vicinity which sends her right back into a spiral of guilt and depression. Feeling “completely covered” by the tragedy that had already marked her out so early, Emily is now on suicide watch, and although both deaths were accidental, describes herself despairingly as “a real-life serial killer on the rise”. So her dad (Michael Tan) comes to her with a proposal: “There’s this camp, for damaged kids, kinda like you, I thought you could be a counsellor there.”
Emily’s rocky road either to salvation or to fully embracing the potential for evil she perceives within herself will play out at this idyllic woodland retreat. For this is a ‘god camp’ whose leader Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp) and long-running camp attendee turned employee Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith) try to instil Christian values in the troubled young folk under their care – and yet Emily, who is not religious, is quickly drawn to her fellow counsellors Clara (Alice Wordsworth), Rosie (Cherry Moore), Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) and Hope (Ella Reece), “freaky weirdoes” who drink, do drugs, hook up, and share a bond cemented in drunken late-night rituals.
“I know what it’s like to be lost,” Clara tells Emily, “to be lost with some guilty conscience about some fucked-up shit that shouldn’t have ever happened.” Indeed this is a film as much about a disorienting mental state as a summer camp. All the young attendees here – like mixed-up, menarchal Eden (Izza Jarvis) – are broken in some way, and many of the staff similarly started out as regular attendees, which is to say that this camp is the remote, wide-open space where trauma comes out to range freely. The keynote here is dissociation, not only suffered by Emily (who drifts through her waking and sleeping experiences in a distant daze), but also induced in the viewer by some hallucinatory visuals, dreamy flashbacks and Robin’s discordant electronic score that occasionally intrudes upon scenes like a bad vibe.
In CAMP, it is never clear what is real, and what merely imagined – but as Emily’s new coterie starts to resemble a coven, and as her intoxicating binges become witchy ceremonials, the quest for redemption, or at least for inner peace, will take her to some very dark places, and to a clearing that is also a blank-eyed catharsis of sorts. This is like Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (1996) reimagined as indie shoegaze psychodrama, where, as in Fast’s previous Honeycomb (2022), collective female energy offers both solidarity and something more sinister. In fact, in a dreary college party scene before Emily even contemplates going to the camp, she runs into a circle of girls sporting red dresses (and in one case, a bloody eyepatch) – just like the characters from Honeycomb – who invite her, as she is looking for her friend Charlie (Giselle Morison), to share their own ‘charlie’ in the bathroom, and who then place on the bathroom door a sign reading “And You Thought It Was All Over!”, as though to acknowledge this film’s continuity with Fast’s debut. Here once more, a group of young women will pass the summer together by their own destructive rules, drifting ever further from the ethical bounds of society – despite Dan’s introductory injunction to “Be gentle, be patient, and for the Lord’s sake, please just be good”.
CAMP offers a literal rite of passage, even if those enacting it seem caught in its eternal return and come back year after year for more, like moths drawn to a flame or like lost souls washed by the recurrent, redirectable waves of trauma. It is a dizzying, unnerving examination of the strength and power that women can use to uplift each other, even if someone else must pay the price for their hedonistic escapism. For here, damage already done is passed on and remorse is compounded, in a ramifying seasonal cycle – and while Emily may have to fall from grace, even to become a serial killer, in order to be on the rise again, where she proves to be no angel, other characters, even in martyrdom, are blessed with different wings. Of course, all these moral and theological tensions may be playing out only in her frazzled, conflicted psyche, but they still reveal the depths, and heights, to which she is willing to go on her journey through grief and guilt over this long summer of supposed recovery. It is possible that we will never see Emily again – but then again, even when you thought it was all over, there is always next summer. Perhaps, after all, time is the only healer.
strap: Avalon Fast’s witch-inflected woman’s picture follows a dreamy, dissociative journey through the cycles of trauma and recovery
© Anton Bitel
