Avalon Fast’s CAMP opens like a memory you’re not entirely sure belongs to you. Grainy images drift across the screen while an old analog song hums through the speakers, creating the sensation of flipping through somebody else’s faded photo album. It’s nostalgic, melancholic, and immediately hypnotic. Before the film has even properly introduced its protagonist, Fast establishes the dreamlike emotional wavelength that CAMP will spend the next ninety minutes exploring.
The story follows Emily (Zola Grimmer), a young woman carrying enough guilt to crush most people far older than her. Years earlier, she accidentally killed a child with her car. More recently, after accepting cocaine from a group of strange women at a party and sharing it with her best friend Charlie (Giselle Morison), she watches in horror as Charlie dies almost immediately after taking it. Whether Emily is truly responsible for these tragedies or merely trapped in a cycle of self-punishment matters less than the fact that she believes she is. Every interaction, every silence, every glance from a stranger feels filtered through that guilt.
At the suggestion of her concerned father (Michael Tan), Emily accepts a position as a counselor at a summer camp for troubled youth. What initially appears to be an opportunity for healing becomes something stranger, more spiritual, and considerably more unnerving. On the train ride there, Fast fills the frame with uneasy stares and distorted landscapes racing past the windows. Nothing looks entirely real. The world outside seems less like physical reality than a projection of Emily’s swirling emotional state.
That feeling extends throughout the entire film. Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Eily Sprungman, CAMP is one of the most visually captivating independent films of the year. The imagery often resembles memory more than reality, with soft textures and surreal compositions in nearly every scene. Looking out a window in this film rarely provides clarity. Instead, it feels like staring into another dimension entirely.
Fast describes their filmmaking style as “Girl Horror,” and CAMP serves as perhaps the clearest articulation yet of what that means. This isn’t horror in the traditional sense. There are no elaborate kill sequences, jump scares, or conventional monsters lurking in the woods. Instead, the terror comes from grief, loneliness, identity, community, and the strange emotional violence of growing up. It’s a coming-of-age story filtered through nightmares, spirituality, and female friendship.
Thankfully, CAMP never mistakes pure atmosphere for substance. The counselors Emily meets become the beating heart of the film. Rosie (Cherry Moore), Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis), Hope (Ella Reece), and Clara (Alice Wordsworth) initially appear like archetypes pulled from similar stories, but Fast gradually reveals them as something far more complex. They smoke, drink, party, and openly challenge the religious structure surrounding the camp, creating a fascinating counterculture within the camp itself.
The standout among them is Clara. What begins as curiosity between her and Emily slowly develops into one of the film’s most compelling emotional relationships. Alice Wordsworth (Eyes in the Woods) gives Clara a magnetic warmth that makes it easy to understand why Emily gravitates toward her, specifically. For perhaps the first time in her life, Emily finds genuine acceptance rather than judgment. CAMP understands how transformative that feeling can be, especially for someone who has spent years convinced they deserve punishment instead of love.
The film is also unexpectedly funny. Grimmer’s deadpan deliveries consistently land, generating moments of dry humor that help prevent the material from becoming emotionally stagnant. Fast and her cast have a refreshing understanding of how awkward young adults actually behave, allowing conversations to feel simultaneously natural, funny, and deeply revealing.
What makes CAMP particularly fascinating is how it continually shifts beneath your feet. The girls’ secret attic gatherings initially resemble harmless acts of rebellion, but the film gradually introduces the possibility that something genuinely supernatural is occurring. Similar to this year’s equally as engrossing Forbidden Fruits, wishes become rituals, rituals become spells, and the line between metaphor and reality grows increasingly blurred. By the time the story reaches its surreal final act, it completes itself with striking religious imagery and visions of cleansing via fire in a full embrace of its dreamlike space.
Yet, despite all of its supernatural elements, CAMP remains smartly grounded in emotional truth. Beneath the witchcraft, the spirituality, the eerie whispers, and the dreamlike imagery is a story about a young woman desperately searching for forgiveness. Not necessarily from others, but from herself.
The easiest comparison might be Sofia Coppola by way of folk horror, but even that doesn’t fully capture what Fast accomplishes here. CAMP feels uniquely personal; a textbook definition of a filmmaker excavating something painful from their own past and transforming it into art. The result is a film that can feel elusive at times, more interested in emotional resonance than narrative clarity, but it remains thoroughly engaging throughout. Very little happens on paper, yet it never feels stagnant. The story continues moving forward even when it seems content to simply exist in a moment.
By the end, CAMP leaves behind answers in favor of feelings. Grief, guilt, friendship, spirituality, identity, and belonging all swirl together into something messy, beautiful, and difficult to shake. Like the memories it so often resembles, the film lingers long after it’s over. You may not be able to explain every image or every choice, but you’ll remember how it felt. And for a film so deeply concerned with the ways trauma embeds itself into memory, that feels entirely appropriate.
'CAMP' opens in select theaters June 26th.
