New England Premiere!

Gather round the campfire for Avalon Fast’s bewitching sophomore outing CAMP, an enchanting tale of loss, healing, and the divine power of female friendship. Wracked with guilt after a series of compounding tragedies, Emily (Zola Grimmer) takes her dad’s advice and accepts a job at a Christian summer camp for troubled kids, hoping to put some distance between herself and the spectre of death that seems to follow her. Upon arriving, Emily is brought into the fold of a tightly-knit coven of returning counselors — Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Sophie Bawks-Smith — who are more interested in attic hang-outs and nighttime bacchanals than watching any of the “little nightmares” they’re assigned to.

This group of lost girls are also uncannily attuned to their surroundings, able to transmute wishes into realities through rituals and minor sacrifices. Their weirding ways offer Emily more than just some much needed companionship — they seem to hold the power to alleviate some of the pain she’s been burdened with. But as the summer goes on, Emily begins to wonder whether witchcraft truly is the best path towards shaking off the past, or if she’s stuck in a neverending cycle of dissociative delusions that’ll keep her at camp forever.

Fast’s latest venture into “girl horror” is a scaled-up but unmistakably handcrafted production that retains the dreamy DIY surrealism of her debut Honeycomb, employing magical touches of animation and intersplicing 8 and 16mm film with DP Eily Sprungman’s ethereal digital photography. Imagine if Nobuhiko Obayashi broke into the editing booth and liberally re-mixed The Craft to his heart’s content. Reminiscent of early Jane Schoenbrun (whose own upcoming camp-set horror film counts Fast among its cast) or any of Sofia Coppola’s excursions into girlhood, CAMP plays in the liminal space between summer’s end and fall’s beginning, where friendships are tested and hazy, sun-soaked memories take on a mythic quality. Layering perceived reality with fairy tale logic, CAMP is a new kind of fantasy film about navigating the uneasy terrains of guilt and self-forgiveness when the world yanks the rug right out from underneath you. –Nicole Veneto

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