Camp (2025)
Directed & Written by Avalon Fast
Starring Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Ella Reece, and Austyn Van de Kamp.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SLIGHT SPOILERS.

There are several films at Fantastic Fest 2025 that announced themselves as singular cinematic visions and one of them was Avalon Fast’s CAMP, the tale of Emily (Zola Grimmer) and her hopeful journey towards healing after tragedy rips a friend from her life. Some time later, Emily signs up to be a counsellor at a camp for “damaged kids” despite being plenty damaged herself. When she arrives at the camp, she meets other counsellors, like Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and Rosie (Cherry Moore), and starts to understand they have peculiar, witchy ways. Her time at camp starts like a normal job, then becomes something else entirely, though Emily’s not immediately sure if that something is good or bad.

CAMP is the work of a director with a very specific perspective, and while there’s a definable plot the surrealism at play leaves the film open to interpretation. There’s something very personal and intimate about CAMP. For me, Fast’s film is a surreal exploration of grief’s all-consuming horror, though it also suggests that, eventually, grief can be overcome, even if the process is complicated, confusing, and messy.
CAMP begins with a metafictional opening on a TV screen at a party Emily’s attending, and the image we see on the screen in a film within a film is the final image of Fast’s film, a blurred shot of a young woman with angel wings. Next to the TV is Rosie, whom we later realise is one the camp counsellors, as if she’s presenting the film, though she says nothing, only staring right into the audience’s soul. This meta opening gives CAMP an intimate feeling, and immediately presents Fast’s film as one ripe for interpretation.

My personal reading of CAMP and its surrealism is that the camp is a liminal space like the last stop before Heaven or Hell. A number of things make this theory plausible. First there’s Emily’s journey towards the camp. Just the train she takes feels otherworldly for some odd, inexplicable reason. Then Emily is suddenly not on the train and in a field before she wanders further through the fields to an archway that says CAMP above it. At the camp, she meets Rosie, clearly for the first time, yet Rosie is the young woman we see at the start of the film in the meta opening standing by the TV at the party. Maybe the most telling of all is how it seems as if each of the counsellors at the camp have some kind of darkness in their past. Emily’s experienced two traumatic instances involving cars, both weighing on her shoulders. Rosie may or may not have some trauma in her life connected to having a child whom she obviously does not have anymore. Then there’s a male counsellor who apparently threw his girlfriend down the stairs back in high school. Perhaps each of the counsellors is waiting on their own individual judgement before they’re carted off to their permanent placement in the afterlife.

“Fall from grace now.”

Maybe CAMP is just a straight forward story about a bunch of young women forming a coven at a summer camp; nothing wrong with that. It feels like so much more is happening in CAMP, and Fast’s ideas give the impression of being far deeper than what’s at the surface level. Emily’s journey to and at the camp will resonate emotionally with those who’ve ever seriously regretted something they’ve done. She finds community that, for better or worse, help her think about a life beyond grief. CAMP moves from defined plot to surreal moments in a single breath, which mirrors the way that life sometimes feels like a train following a track then, out of nowhere, suddenly goes off the rails into undefinable chaos. Fast’s film refuses strict categorisation, feeling at once like a drama about damaged people built on dreamlike surrealism and also an existential horror about the afterlife of grief.