One of my professors back in film school had this grotty turn of phrase—"the deflowering of the gaze,"^[1] by which he meant to describe the feeling of how, once you learned to analyze movie (or even worse, to make them) you never really could watch a movie the same way again.

If you're someone who likes to watch violent or transgressive or libidinal movies (and in my experience that's most people who think too much about movies) the experience can be a bit like being, simultaneously, both the guy in the dungeon getting whipped and the goateed psychoanalyst standing in the corner of the dungeon going "Mm-hmm; and how did that make you feel?"

Camp Miasma is almost constructed as an explicit antidote to that. There's a temptation to say something along the lines of "Finally: a movie for, by, and about movie perverts." Which would be a droll joke about how so many movies are by, for, and about movie perverts. But there's really more going on here than just that. This isn't a case of a movie trying to be so extreme that you lose grip on that analytical gaze, which some people have tried to varying degrees of success. Rather, Camp Miasma is interested in charting a path through the analytical gaze that loops back to the original libidinal impulse, to whatever manufacturer's defect in the makeup of your brain made you a movie pervert and not a well-adjusted person who, I don't know, has regular Catan night with the polycule or whatever.

This it achieves both by being incredibly funny and incredibly unpredictable. And, oddly enough, by never really letting go of that delight in being a movie about movies. I went in expecting this to be a riff on Sleepaway Camp, and it is, but it is really just very much doing full-on A Salute to Da Movies, in the way that only movies can really do that. Cinema is a medium that largely only exists as cut-up little assemblages of itself, right? It's self-referential by nature, incomplete in the Gödelian sense.

But the magic trick in Camp Miasma is that the first time in this movie that you see (eg) that a scene is set in a matte painting, or that it looks like the specific out-of-focus effect from Eternal Sunshine, etcetera, you go "I recognize that." But the second time the movie has you and you just take it in as what it is in the movie and not just a signifier; it's like the movie is unwrapping them.

Absolutely beautiful film, movie of the year, incredible piece of work, I am so glad to have gone see this in a (packed) theater.

1. Sign that millennials are aging: R-Pat is now Hugh Grant

2. I'm kind of fascinated by how extreme and intense of a reaction everyone in this movie has to [the fact that causes the titular drama]. It's interesting because I cannot really define what a reasonable response would be, but at the same time it seemed like a bit of an overreaction.

3. It's so weird how R-Pat is tall and short at the same time. Like he's a terrible little homunculus and also a sort of lanky and ungainly creature that has to hunch to get through doors

4. This movie has a lot of great faces. Obviously R-Pat is always good for a few of these but everyone is doing some excellent face work.

5. I really appreciate the acting choice of him just awkwardly holding on to her tit the entire time they're having that conversation, as if holding on for dear life

Rewatching this (in a theater this time) I'm just struck by how much of this movie is Kati Outinen's face. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that is more carried by a single actor. And she's doing it here in a performance where she gets precious little dialogue and almost no action. I don't know how many film actors there have ever been who could do what she does here. The final sequence remains one of the greatest things I've ever seen in a movie.

Kati Outinen is the whole deal here, wearing a mask of impassivity the whole movie but always with so much bubbling under the surface. This is still middle period Kaurismäki, with the same icy gaze that also haunts Lights in the Dusk. But it’s a much gentler version of that; a downright optimistic movie under all the melancholy.

I can see why some real Kaurismaniacs might love this movie, but for me it just doesn’t have the  same life that’s in Shadows in Paradise, or the sharpness of Match Factory Girl.