I went to camp exactly one time as a kid, and that was enough for me. It wasn’t a theater camp, a band camp, or a Bible camp where everyone shared some common passion. It was just an outdoors camp with hiking, activities, and all the things parents think build character. Maybe they do. I just never felt the urge to go back. Camp, the new Canadian film from Avalon Fast, takes a very different approach to the idea of summer camp. This isn’t a place where kids learn archery or horseback riding. It’s a camp for troubled youth, and the person leading us into that world is Emily, played by Zola Grimmer, who might be carrying more emotional baggage than anyone she’s supposed to be helping.

We’re introduced to Emily at a party where she’s pressured into revealing far more about her past than she wants to. The reactions from people who don’t really know her immediately tell you everything about how she’s viewed outside her closest circle. Before she even has time to process that experience, she leaves with her friend Charlie, only for Charlie to overdose in the car beside her. It’s another devastating tragedy piled onto an already painful life, one that lands Emily in a mental health facility under suicide watch. When she’s finally discharged, her father decides the perfect next step is sending her to work as a counselor at a camp for troubled youth. Emily isn’t exactly enthusiastic about the idea, but if she doesn’t go, there isn’t much of a movie.

Once she arrives, she discovers the camp is religious, something that immediately puts her a little outside her comfort zone. The counselors, most of whom grew up as campers themselves, welcome her surprisingly warmly. Clara, Rosie, Nev, Hope, Jo, and Eden, played by Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Ella Reece, Sophie Bawks-Smith, and Izza Jarvis, never make Emily feel like she’s beyond saving. They see someone who’s hurting, not someone who’s broken, and for a little while it feels like Emily may finally have found a place where she can start putting the pieces of her life back together.

Then Camp reveals the turn that separates it from a more traditional coming-of-age drama. Emily discovers this close-knit friend group is actually a witch’s coven. This is the second witch coven movie I’ve seen this year after Forbidden Fruits, and while the comparison is an easy one to make, they’re really trying to accomplish very different things. Forbidden Fruits leans much harder into dark comedy and violence. Camp is far quieter. It technically qualifies as horror, but it’s more interested in atmosphere, emotional uncertainty, and the fear that comes from not knowing who to trust than it is in gore or jump scares. It’s really an indie coming-of-age story with supernatural elements woven through it.

What I appreciated most is that the coven never becomes the movie you’d expect. There’s never that scene where everyone suddenly drops the act and reveals they were secretly evil the whole time. They don’t transform into monsters in the third act or start behaving like some creepy Stepford cult. They’re simply themselves from beginning to end. That restraint gives the story room to breathe and lets Emily’s journey remain the emotional center instead of turning everything into a battle between good and evil.

There’s a sequence where each of the girls makes a wish, and the movie plays with the ambiguity of whether those wishes actually come true. Some are long-term hopes that could easily be coincidence, while others, especially Nev’s, feel much more immediate. Watching those wishes unfold becomes one of the film’s more intriguing ideas. The coven itself also isn’t one giant hive mind. The girls have their own personalities, opinions, and conversations, even if the movie understandably keeps bringing us back to Emily. After everything she’s survived, it’s impossible not to root for her to find some measure of peace, even if whether she actually gets it remains intentionally ambiguous.

I also liked what Camp had to say about power within friend groups. The witches draw strength through the suffering of others, which isn’t all that different from the way cliques sometimes operate in high school. They build themselves up by tearing someone else down. Even though these women are long past their school years, they’ve carried that dynamic with them because, from their perspective, it’s always worked. That idea feels more interesting than simply making them evil witches, and it gives the supernatural elements something meaningful to say about human behavior.

For such a small production, I thought the performances were consistently strong across the board. I wasn’t familiar with anyone in the cast beforehand, but Zola Grimmer carries the film beautifully. Emily is an incredibly difficult character because she’s constantly balancing grief, guilt, trauma, hope, and the desire to keep moving forward without ever fully believing she deserves forgiveness. Grimmer finds that balance, and the supporting cast helps make the camp feel like a real place populated by real people instead of stock horror movie characters.

My biggest criticism has nothing to do with the filmmaking itself. Camp currently doesn’t include audio description, which made following parts of the movie significantly harder as a blind film critic. I was able to piece together most of what was happening, but there were several dialogue-free sequences where I had to research afterward just to connect the dots. That’s frustrating, and it makes recommending the film to blind and low vision audiences much more difficult. Unfortunately, that’s still the reality with far too many independent films, and sometimes even movies that do include audio description leave me wondering if important visual information was missed.

Camp premiered through the festival circuit before receiving a limited theatrical release in the United States, and I genuinely hope it finds a larger audience once it reaches streaming and video on demand. It reminded me of all sorts of camp movies for completely different reasons. Heavyweights popped into my head. So did The Craft because, well, witches. I even found myself thinking about Wet Hot American Summer, They/Them, and somehow even Summer Camp with Kathy Bates and Diane Keaton. Once this movie gets you thinking about camp, your brain starts opening every dusty cabin door it can find.

If you get the chance to see Camp, I think you should. It’s an intimate little film that deserves people talking about it, and while I wish it were more accessible, I also don’t want that to overshadow what it accomplishes. It’s thoughtful, emotionally grounded, surprisingly restrained, and anchored by a lead performance that’s easy to invest in. And for whatever it’s worth, I enjoyed Camp quite a bit more than I enjoyed my own experience at summer camp. Frankly, I enjoyed it a lot more than Summer Camp, the film, too.

Fresh: 7.7/10