Reaching orgasm thanks to Gillian Anderson and a psychopathic killer

Special correspondent to the Cannes Film FestivalIf with Scream horror cinema entered its meta phase, with Teenage sex & death at Camp Miasma, which opened the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, the genre enters a new phase of hyper-reflection and absolute self-awareness. Jane Schoenbrun's film is a love letter to the slasher subgenre of the 80s – that of sagas like Friday the 13th, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street– and, at the same time, a relentless satire full of cinephile jokes about Hollywood's current obsession with remakes, and reboots. But, above all, it is something unusual in 2026: a vindication of the Dionysian power of horror cinema, which was the audiovisual space in which various generations of teenagers – especially those of the 80s video stores – experienced their sexual awakening amidst predictable stimuli (female motherhood, heteronormative sex) and others less common (psychopathic killers, liters of blood, violent deaths).

From its first images of merchandise derived from a fictional slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, the film oozes absolute devotion to the genre that coexists with the critical vision incorporated by Schoenbrun, an extremely intelligent trans filmmaker who does not limit herself to imitating or parodying the films that marked her childhood, but rather uses their imagery to reflect aloud – there is nothing implicit, everything is verbalized, even the cinephile references – on identity, desire, and the eternal link between sex and violence in horror cinema.

The plot revolves around a young filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder, from the series Hacks

) who, after catching Hollywood's attention with a low-budget film at the Sundance Festival, is commissioned to revive the Camp Miasma franchise. The studio only wants to monetize a devalued intellectual property, but she takes it seriously and contacts Billy Presley, the star of the first installment, now retired, played by a charismatic Gillian Anderson who is more lustful and Sapphic than ever. Anderson and Einbinder form a duo full of sexual chemistry that culminates in a memorable and orgasmic finale.

Schoenbrun films history with aesthetic unease and impeccable musical taste. The cinematic packaging is encouraging and the discursive proposal is clear to the point of explaining itself. Love for cinema beats in many films, but here, moreover, it reflects with originality on the intimate connection that is sometimes established between an artistic work and its audience.

Thomas Mann's return to Germany

After an uneven start, great cinema arrived on Thursday in the Cannes competition thanks to the Pole Pawel Pawlikowski, who in Fatherland recounts a very specific moment in the life of Thomas Mann: when in 1949 the author of The Magic Mountain travels to Germany for the first time after the Second World War to receive two awards, one in West Germany and another in communist Germany. The director of Cold War focuses on the writer's relationship with his daughter, a woman with an adventurous past (actress, writer, racing driver) who now accompanies her father and helps him as he contemplates with icy horror the ruin of his family and his homeland.

Sandra Hüller solidifies her status as the European actress of the moment with a magnificent and very restrained performance, much like the film, which hides its emotions beneath the extraordinary black and white images of cinematographer Lukasz Zal. In just 80 minutes, Pawlikowski paints with a handful of brushstrokes the moral failure of a man and a people who do not learn from their mistakes; there is much coldness and ghosts, press conferences, a memorable conversation with Wagner's children, communist pomp, and a moving ending in which Bach's music is the only light of a civilization in ruins.

Another Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, is the inspiration forHistoires parallèles, the reinvention by Asghar Farhadi of the episode You Shall Not Covet from Kieslowski's Decalogue. It is a very loose remake that, with a stellar French cast (Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel and, in a small cameo, Catherine Deneuve), reflects on the stories we invent about others and the clash between reality and fiction, an interesting proposal despite reiterating the Iranian filmmaker's tendency towards melodrama.