“We are the weirdos, mister.”
– Nancy (Fairuza Balk) in The Craft (1996)
These five lines are iconic for a number of reasons, many of them quite personal to the individuals who recall and restate them nearly 30 years later; however, in my view, they speak to a reclamation of self after spending a period feeling outside of society and acknowledging, finally, that that’s ok, that being one’s self doesn’t mean living in shame or being filled with guilt for the things we aren’t or can’t be, that loving one’s self starts with acceptance, and, once found, brings about empowerment. This is the push-pull that exists within writer/director Avalon Fast’s (Honeycomb) latest film, CAMP, which had its world premiere during Fantastic Fest 2025 where it won Best Picture in the Next Wave section. Audiences won’t know whether what we’re experiencing alongside the center character is currently happening, a retelling, or a perceived memory, but that confusion won’t impact the transformative elements within.
L-R: Zola Grimmer as Emily and Cherry Moore as Rosie in CAMP. Photo courtesy of Dark Sky Films.
Trauma seems to follow Emily (Zola Grimmer) as she experiences horrifying events first as a teen and then as a young adult. After the second instance, her father (Mike Tan) recommends she attend Camp, a place for troubled kids where she could work as a counselor. Not only would it make her more active, but it would position her to help other kids with similarly difficult backgrounds. However, rather than bond with the campers, Emily finds herself making fast friends with the other counselors who invite her in to their group with open arms. As summer goes on, their nighttime revelries bring them ever closer until Emily finds herself on a precipice that may determine the course of her life forever.
Fast sets the tone for CAMP immediately through the use of footage that looks captured on 8mm or 16 mm film, grain and marks of wear swirling around as we see someone driving down a wood-laden road. Absent clarity of picture, one presumes this is a memory, tarnished by time and, as we come to realize, possibly trauma. Later in the film as Emily discusses or experiences certain things, present day is intercut with quick images from this sequence like intrusive thoughts that are thrust into her mind, slicing and dicing as they erupt from the past, refusing to settle or dissolve. This opening is indicative of a dark secret that Emily possesses, except, as made clear in the sequence after the cold open/title, she’s quite open with this particular memory, it’s just that others aren’t and seem to recoil, resulting in a sensation of something being wrong or broken within Emily herself. If self is a creation of both intrinsic and extrinsic values and experiences, what is Emily going to construct for herself as her trauma is seen as “too much” to handle by some while others try to quell her concerns? In this way, the welcoming she receives from her fellow counselors must feel like a relief as she’s welcomed into their circle entirely as she is, pain and all.
L-R: Lea Rose Sebastianis as Nev, Zola Grimmer as Emily, and Ella Reece as Hope in CAMP. Photo courtesy of Dark Sky Films.
Interestingly, Fast utilizes a framework that makes the whole of CAMP difficult to track as real or imagined. Obviously, it’s imagined in the sense that we’re watching a film which has been scripted and directed by Fast, shot by Eily Sprungman (Riding Shotgun), and performed by the cast. What I mean by this is that from the cold open that establishes Emily’s first traumatic incident, Fast establishes a film-within-a-film framework via a transition from the cold open to our proper introduction to Emily as she attends a party with her friend Charlie (Giselle Morison). Fast does this by having the perspective of events we observe be revealed to exist on an old tube flat screen television set that someone is watching, the image on the TV screen freezing before draining of its color, the title appearing in black and white while someone turns from watching the tv screen to looking directly at us for a noticeable amount of time before a smash to black that ends with the reveal of a party going on. Between the set dressing around the tv, one can project that the tv and the party exist in the same space and, from the shift in perspective, one can create a sense that Fast has now positioned us to stand alongside that individual shown with the title card as observers to what follows. This theory seems supported by several notions, one of which being that the characters we see at the party all seem frozen until one makes a comment and then they all come alive as though we’re watching a staged production. Likewise, later in the film, Fast incorporates several animated elements — whether in small decorative motifs or full or brief sequences — that don’t make sense in a grounded tale but do if one views the whole of CAMP as a possible delusion or fairytale. How ever one looks at the events of the film, Fast’s layering of frameworks, of varied realities, only helps to sustain the sense that what Emily goes through is transcendent, even if just for her and even if it’s not entirely real.
Emily’s journey is one filled with moments that appear tied to her gender and sexuality, two aspects that this reviewer is unqualified to discuss due to a lack of lived experience. That said, it’s fascinating how Fast seeks to link Emily’s journey of acceptance to ideas of religion (thereby creating a delineation of good and evil), utilizing the concept of camp as a place to commune with nature and create bonds through the simply-titled Camp, and the role in which sisterhood plays in finding her strength (or challenging her grip on reality). Viewed through the lens of varied realities, a question arises, stealthy, slowly, as to whether Emily is experiencing an awakening of self or dropping further into a nightmare and that’s where Fast hooks you. The absence of clear ground, of any sense of anchoring the further we go into CAMP, the more our grip on what’s truth erodes, mirroring Emily’s own journey of discovery and acceptance.
L-R: Cherry Moore as Rosie, Zola Grimmer as Emily, Lea Rose Sebastianis as Nev, and Ella Reece as Hope in CAMP. Photo courtesy of Dark Sky Films.
Between Grimmer’s delicate performance (perpetually walking the line between sincere naturalism and dissociative distance), cinematography, and framework, one doesn’t know whether to find CAMP restorative or not and, frankly, it’s all the better for it. Fast has constructed a film that isn’t to be seen and absorbed, but to be wrestled with in the watch and after, to be turned over and around, to be fought with actively, in pursuit of understanding. A life lived is a life examined or, put another way, as Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” meaning that CAMP lingers because one must engage it to understand whether Emily rises or falls by the end. Some of it is a matter of perspective, to be sure, as she finds her people, her own group of weirdos, but, are they the sort who will help her recover or is it merely a temporary salve in need of constant reapplication? Is that true reclamation or a falsehood? Depends on whether you see CAMP as a lucid dream or a waking nightmare.
Screening during Fantastic Fest 2025.
For more information, head to the official Fantastic Fest CAMP webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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