In her latest role, Emmy winner Hannah Einbinder plays a young up-and-comer in the entertainment industry, who finds herself in close quarters with a daunting, no-nonsense veteran star.
Hannah’s character strikes up a unique and close bond with the former screen icon, once considered to be at the top of her field, and they manage to overcome their differences through their shared work on an exciting creative endeavour.
Should any of that sound a little familiar, rest assured that this is where the similarities with Hacks abruptly end.
Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, in fact, is a blood-soaked slasher that both pokes fun at and celebrates, in equal measure, the horror movies that so many of us discover at formative stages of our lives, in all their problematic glory.
Hannah takes the lead as Kris Williams, a young director tasked with rebooting a beloved slasher series that has been a favourite of hers since childhood. To help get the film off the ground, she tracks down the original’s “final girl”, who has turned her back on the industry and is now living a quiet and solitary life off the grid.
As the two grow closer, things take a number of surreal and unexpected turns, until – true to form for director Jane Schoenbrun, who previously helmed We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow – the lines between reality and fantasy begin to blur, all while the film tackles ambitious subjects like gender identity, sexual repression and the impact the art we love can have on us, for better or worse.
Camp Miasma is the first project many of us will have seen Hannah in since her five-season stint as aspiring comedy writer Ava Daniels in Hacks came to an end, something she acknowledges was on her mind while considering her next steps after the award-winning comedy.
“It definitely was something that I considered,” Hannah tells HuffPost UK, shortly before Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma’s release on this side of the Atlantic.
“How could I do something that felt ‘on par’ with Hacks in a way – which is a very high bar – but also felt tonally and stylistically very different? And how could I embody a character that felt really, really different from Ava? And it is my hope that that has occurred.”
Initially, she was attracted to “the fantasy element of Miasma, and how we get to kind of dive deeply into a world within a world”.
“Even reading the script, you could see that it was going to be this magical, visual feast,” she recalls. “And having seen the film, it’s far more visually dazzling than you could ever imagine. It’s a really far out, crazy ride. So, yeah, I was really pleased to do Miasma after Hacks.”
While Hacks paired Hannah with seven-time Emmy winner Jean Smart as the formidable Deborah Vance, in Camp Miasma, she shares the screen with another legendary performer, Gillian Anderson, who shines throughout the film as the eccentric former-scream-queen-turned-recluse Billy Presley.
At the time she was first cast, Hannah didn’t actually know who would play the Billy to her Kris, but recalls Jane “telling me a couple of the people that they were thinking of for Billy”.
“Gillian was the most exciting person to me, and to them,” she explains. “So, when she said yes, it was very cool.”
Thankfully, Gillian more than lived up to expectations of being “super cool, really funny and warm”.
Source: Read the original article on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
