“Little nightmares,” a fellow counselor hisses into Emily’s ear as a bus full of kids show up in “CAMP,” which isn’t so much disdain for the preteens they’ll be looking after so much as the fact they have to look after them. Emily (Zola Grimmer) wouldn’t be at the camp herself if she wasn’t under a watchful eye when her father thinks the fresh air and the change of scenery would be good for her after her friend OD’d at a party. Both have to be perversely amused by the thought that she’d be in charge of anyone else given her fragile state, though at the religious camp designed as a retreat sensitive to the needs of young damaged psyches, she’s a tad too old in her early twenties to be a camper and seemingly too young to submit to some more rigorous form of therapy when any other formal attempts don’t seem to do her any good. When “little nightmares” are all she knows, haunted by both her friend’s death in her presence and the life she actually took herself years earlier when she hit a four-year-old in an unfortunate car accident, she proves to be right at home amongst the outcasts.
Even with just a few thousand dollars, director Avalon Fast immediately distinguished herself with her phantasmagoric debut “Honeycomb,” and there’s nothing her truly inspired follow-up can really be compared to, but it wouldn’t be too far off to describe as if “The Craft” were actually made by one of its Wiccan high schoolers, full of dream logic and an endearing aversion to polishing off any of its rough edges. Fast recognizes that power comes from the unpredictability of nonconformity both in her own storytelling and the particular tale of Emily, who doesn’t lend herself to any easy classification, taking a place at the center of the frame as a natural hero but whose deep doubts make even herself wonder if she’s the villain. She eerily isn’t uncomfortable talking about any of the bad things that have befallen her, but unsettled by the fact that it only seems to fall on deaf ears. This disparity allows Fast to imagine a house party at the beginning of “CAMP” as if you’ve reached the back of the Bates Motel when the apathetic strangers around her age try to liven the festivities with a game of truth or dare and making their lack of interest in Emily clear, she holds the trump card of telling them about the kid she hit with her car once she’s innocently asked about her biggest regret.
Confessing what she does to the group would seem to be as good an answer in the queasy silence that follows, but she only really laments that being so honest doesn’t seem to yield much of a response, told by someone in the room that she probably ought to confide in people that are closer to her and when her friend Charlie does too much coke on the ride home, that isn’t even an option. Only Fast might think that the best way of getting Emily out of the woods would be to literally put her in them when the young woman heads to the countryside looking far more like one of the campers than a counselor, apprehensive and distrustful of her instincts, though she is immediately taken under the wing of her roommate Rosie (Cherry Moore), who is delighted by the presence of “another gorgeous weirdo like the rest of us.” Fast allows one to be able to see what Rosie does with unusual clarity, assembling a collection of misfits whose immediate openness to one another becomes part of their radiance as they clearly are very much their own selves.
Even before the other counselors such as Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) and Clara (Alice Wordsworth) ask “Can we show Emily the attic?” – the upstairs retreat where some actual dalliances with black magic occur – it would seem being unapologetic about who they are is part of the spell and it’s amusing to watch Emily achieve the desired outcome of finding religion at the camp, even if those beliefs are hardly Christian, amongst fellow travelers. Her awakening is expressed less by any transformation in her own mood than the formal shapeshifting that Fast conjures around her, once again tapping into a lo-fi ingenuity to keep any sense of stability at bay with gently surreal animation and offbeat pacing. While some viewers may be put off by the occasionally flat performances of a cast full of first-time actors or the earnestness of the lines they sometimes have to deliver, that can be enjoyed as a feature more than a bug when it’s a reminder of a certain innocence at play and it contributes overall to the handmade quality that Fast leans into as everything in “CAMP” would seem to emerge from a genuine place where a spirit really does take over in a variety of ways.
Fast’s treatment of trauma or neurodiversity is so radically different than how it is typically portrayed in films that one almost needs to be reminded as Emily does that the reason everyone that’s sent to the camp for the summer is because they’re disturbed in some way as she has trouble reaching one of the younger campers. But as much as “CAMP” relates the terror of feeling so isolated – the good if misguided intentions of the devout leader of the camp Dan (Austin Van de Kamp) are acknowledged in his creation of “safe spaces” that Fast makes clear can be the most dangerous of all when they usually only aggravate what’s going on in someone else’s head – the director’s vision goes beyond having a strong imagination for bringing viewers into a single experience, but when making room for the notion that there are so many other experiences happening in parallel, Fast has big ideas for the horror genre itself, designing films that aren’t meant to scare anyone off but rather welcoming all who have scars to spare.
“Camp” will next screen at Sitges on October 13th at Sala Tramuntana Melia at 10:45 am and 14th at Cinema Escorxador at 9 pm, SXSW Sydney on October 16th at Palace Central at 3:30 pm and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 19th at 7 pm at the Nitehawk Williamsburg.