5 Indie Movies This Week: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Tony, Poison & More

This week on Indie Film Weekly, Glen Reynolds highlights five indie films worth knowing about: three in theaters, one on demand, and one classic.

🎥 Indie Film Reviews:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Tony (2026)
CatVideoFest 2026 (2026)
The Outrun (2024)
Poison (1991)

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Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of August 7th, 2026. I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds. This week in theaters, we've got a queer meta slasher at a cursed camp franchise. We've got young Anthony Bourdain thrown into a province town kitchen. And we've got cat videos in theaters because cinema contains multitudes. Quick ask before we move on. If you can see one of these in the theater this weekend, indie films need early tickets, not couch admiration three months later. On demand, I've got Sertia Ronin rebuilding her life on the Orkney Islands after rehab. And for our classic, we're celebrating a 35th anniversary Todd Haynes debut that still feels like a provocation. Want the written version of these picks each week? I also publish the indie film weekly newsletter. It's the same five films and a quick read. Sign up at newsletter.com. Let's dive in. Our first indie film in theaters this week is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Directed by Jane Schoenbrunn. This is a queer meta slasher about a horror franchise trying to rise from the dead, which is exactly what horror franchises do for a living. Hannah Einbinder plays an enthusiastic young filmmaker hired to revive the long-running Camp Miasma series after years of limp sequels and fading fan interest. Her big idea is to bring back the original Final Girl, now a reclusive figure played by Gillian Anderson. That sounds like smart branding. It also sounds like the beginning of very bad boundaries. The film turns the reboot process into something psychological, sexual, bloody, and unstable. It's also about who owns a story, who gets used by a story, and what happens when a director becomes obsessed with the person she thinks can save the movie. Schoenbrunn has a gift for making genre feel like identity trouble, wearing a costume, and this setup gives them a slasher playground with a lot of knives in the drawer. It premiered a can, which also tells you this is not just a kill-count machine. If you like horror that knows the rules, breaks the rules, then asks why the rules were so strange in the first place, this is the one. Our second indie film in theaters this week is Tony, directed by Matt Johnson. This follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain before the books, the television, the travel, and the myth. He arrives in Provincetown wanting to be a writer, then stumbles into the world of a restaurant kitchen. That is where the summer starts to shape him. The film is not about the polished, cigarette voiced cultural figure everyone remembers. It is about the kid before that, hungry, uncertain, arrogant in flashes, but not yet aware that the chaos around him may become his education. Dominic Sessa plays Bourdain, and it makes sense. He has that tall, slightly out of place energy, like someone trying to look more confident than he feels. The kitchen is the real school here. Heat, speed, yelling, knives, burns, flirting, exhaustion, and the weird family structure that forms when everyone is overworked and pretending they are fine. Johnson is a good match for this because he understands people chasing identity through workplaces, systems, and self-invention. The fun is watching the ingredients come together before the recipe exists. The future voice is not formed yet, but you can hear pieces of it. If you ever worked in a restaurant, this may trigger memories. Some good, some involving a manager who used the word team too much. Our last indie film in theaters this week is Cat Video Fest 2026. Directed, curated, assembled, blessed, or possibly herded by people with stronger focus than most of us. This is a 70-minute theatrical collection of cat videos. Yes, that is the movie. And honestly, there are worse arguments for going to the theater. The point is not the plot. The point is communal absurdity. Cats knocking things off tables. Cats staring into the void like they know what happens after death. Cats getting stuck in boxes they absolutely chose to enter. Cats showing the exact level of emotional availability that would get a person described as difficult. The genius of this as a theatrical experience is that the internet is usually solitary. You watch a clip at your desk or on your phone and pretend you are working. Here, the clips become a crowd event. People laugh together. Kids lose their minds. Adults pretend they came for the children, which is adorable and not always true. There's also a charitable angle to many cat video fest screens, with theaters often partnering with local animal organizations. So, yes, this is silly. But silly has value. If your week has been too serious and you want 70 minutes of low-stakes joy with strangers, this is a valid and possibly medically advisable choice. So in theaters this week, that's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Tony, and Cat Video Fest 2026. Our spotlight indie film on demand this week is The Outrun. Directed by Nora Fingscheid, it stars Sertia Ronan as Rona, a young woman who returns to the Orkney Islands after rehab, trying to rebuild herself in the place she once wanted to escape. The film moves between the Russian wreckage of her years in London and the stark, windy isolation of home. That structure matters because recovery is not shown as a clean before and after story. It's memory, temptation, shame, boredom, small victories, and the body slowly learning how to exist without the old escape hatch. Ronan is terrific because she does not make Rona noble. She makes her alive, difficult, funny and flashes, and sometimes impossible to help. The Orkney landscape becomes part of the drama, not as a cure, but as a force that strips away performance. There's nowhere to hide from the wind, the sea, or yourself, which is inconvenient if yourself has been the problem. The film also understands that going home can be both comforting and brutal. People remember who you were, even when you're trying to prove you are becoming someone else. You can rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, or Fandango at home. Our indie film classic this week is Poison, celebrating its 35th anniversary. Directed by Todd Haynes, this 1991 debut is not one story, but three braided together like a dare. One section is styled like a tabloid documentary about a young boy who kills his father and disappears. Another is a black and white science fiction horror riff about a scientist whose experiment goes wrong in the most socially contagious way possible. The third is a prison story about desire, memory, and punishment. The film is inspired by Jean Genet, and it does not try to make itself comfortable for the room. That is the point. Haynes takes fear, shame, queerness, violence, and moral panic and turns them into different movie languages. It's part melodrama, part pulp, part art film, and part middle finger to the idea that a first feature should behave. What still stands out is the confidence. The movie is messy in a deliberate way, but it knows exactly what it is attacking. It came out during the AIDS crisis and the culture wars, and you can feel that pressure in every frame. This is not a casual classic pick. It is prickly, strange, and important. You can watch it on the Criteria channel or rent it on Apple, Amazon, or Fandango at home. And that wraps it for the August 7, 2026 edition of Indie Film Weekly. If you want to support the show, do the simple stuff. Subscribe so you don't miss next week. Share it with one friend who likes to be early. Rate it because it helps the apps take the show seriously. Then leave a quick review because even one sentence helps. Until next week, keep it fearless, keep it curious, and keep it indie.