Avalon Fast’s micro-budget Canadian horror “Camp” opens with a confession that detonates Emily’s life, then pushes her into a queer sleepaway-camp coven where guilt gets ritualized into something like flight. The film blends sex-and-death shocks, witchy woodla
The first minutes of Avalon Fast’s micro-budget Canadian horror film “Camp” don’t ease you in. They rip the wound open—twice—as Emily answers a truth-or-dare question at a moribund house party with the kind of detail that changes how everyone looks at the room.
Emily. played by newcomer Zola Grimmer. is just starting to heal from the worst hurt of her life when she’s asked to name her biggest regret. In a scene that lands with party-stupid awkwardness. she confesses that a few years earlier. she hit and killed a little kid with her car. The room shifts. The glances turn. The party energy collapses into something close to public shame.
One girl tells Emily this isn’t the right place for that kind of thing—that she should talk to a professional. Emily bails with her best friend Charlie and a few baggies of cocaine for the car ride home. But the ride becomes the second fracture. Barely on the road, Charlie dies of a (presumably fentanyl-induced) overdose in the passenger seat. Emily is left with the kind of grief that doesn’t just hurt—it accuses. She’s already a college dropout, described here as the guiltiest in all of Western Canada. After Charlie’s death, she feels like a serial killer.
Her dad recommends a job as a counselor at a sleepaway camp for damaged kids. It’s an escape route with a trapdoor underneath it: she can either be the worst possible candidate or uniquely well-qualified, and the film spends the rest of its runtime testing which reality fits.
Camp becomes Emily’s new pressure chamber. Campers do eventually show up—one even has their first period under Emily’s watch—but they flutter in and out. more like passing weather than the story’s main weather system. Fast keeps the focus where the film’s emotional physics really live: the bond Emily forms with the other counselors. A group of “gorgeous weirdos” swan around the woods like joyful goths. each bringing a different kind of need and a different flavor of devotion.
Rosie (Cherry Moore) teases the “hot and loose energy of the summer” and slips into conversation about having had a kid of her own once. as if the camp’s safety guarantees that no one will ever make it relevant to their friendship. Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) fantasizes about having sex with ultra-Christian camp leader Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp). framed less as lust than as a desire to offer his virginity to the darkness. Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith) seems tuned to an unseen force. Clara (Alice Wordsworth) resembles Emily just enough to feel like a mirror with teeth.
The film keeps underplaying the sexual tension among these characters—only to the point where it reflects what Emily can’t stop looking for: a way to absolve her guilt. In “Camp,” therapy doesn’t come to redeem her. Jesus doesn’t. And even the film’s flirtation with witchy menace doesn’t translate into a simple revenge fantasy. It takes pains to reject—or at least pass over—the idea of killing men as a path for women reclaiming power. Instead. the story keeps returning to the same idea again and again: power lives in the sisterhood. and the counselors stay kind to each other even when violence enters the picture.
What’s most disorienting is how little the film treats its own premises as questions to be answered. The setup could invite a whole checklist—what relationship do the counselors have with the occult. why are the campers damaged. whether the camp itself has a shameful or sinister history. “Camp” doesn’t chase any of that. It simply asserts its queerness by searching for heterodox ways to settle Emily’s soul. insisting that orientation can come from what the characters find in each other.
That faith shows up in the way the movie holds your attention. The drone-like pull isn’t built on plot mechanics or genre clarity; it’s built on atmosphere and repetition and mood. The film’s lo-fi dialogue scenes can feel clumsy and airless at first. but they also sharpen your focus—like “Camp” asks you to watch its surface roughness as part of the ritual. Even its aesthetic choices start to read like sacrifice: a superficial amateurishness offered up to attune the audience to something more intuitive.
And then, as if the camp itself is learning how to glow, the craft underneath becomes impossible to miss. Cinematographer Eily Sprungman turns “normality” into a blur of soft enchantment as Emily comes to feel at home with the coven. By the end. daylight carries a heavenly glow. and even the beads of sweat on a dying body sparkle with a beauty Emily had never been able to find anywhere else in the tragedy of her life.
The sound and image are supported by Max Rubin’s spare. reverb-heavy synth and guitar score. which the film’s sound world deliberately echoes with music that feels reminiscent of Alex G’s work for Jane Schoenbrun’s films—particularly the fugue-like self-discovery carved out of white noise. From thick gels and billowing fog to gorgeous bursts of animation. “Camp” reshapes the “most fucked up parts” of Emily’s life into a path toward forgiveness.
By the closing stretch. the story’s witchy logic lands in a specific. human place: a clearing where God once brought Clara to the devil so the devil could bring Clara to her closest friends—the only people capable of returning her to herself. “Camp” ends up feeling like cost-effective witchcraft that trusts the course it charts: healing someone who should never have felt so broken in the first place.
“Camp” carries a grade of B+.
Dark Sky Films will release “Camp” in theaters on Friday, June 26.
Avalon Fast Camp Zola Grimmer micro-budget Canadian horror sleepaway camp queer horror witchy film Dark Sky Films Eily Sprungman Max Rubin Cherry Moore Lea Rose Sebastianis Austyn Van de Kamp Sophie Bawks-Smith Alice Wordsworth horror tropes Alberta Tim Horton soccer camp