I Saw The TV Glow

 I think it's safe to say I didn't really like Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair that much. Still, mostly thanks to a remarkably sweet ending, it's stuck with me. So when the trailer for their follow-up movie looked cool, I decided to give it a go. But it took me a while to get around to it.
 This, dear reader, was a mistake. The delay, I mean, not deciding to watch it; I Saw The TV Glow is... well, it's fucking delightful. Yes, I hate that word so much that I feel I need to cut it with some swearwords. And the promise that the word 'vibes' will not be used hereafter.

 It's set in some generic American suburb in the mid-nineties - and hey, they're giving the 80's a rest, for once! We know it's the mid-nineties because the 'saxophone guy' is up for re-election and the gym at the school both protagonists attend has been converted into a polling station. The film, incidentally, uses the gym recurringly being transformed into non-gym-like shapes as a not-too-subtle but cute nod at its themes.

 In any case - that's where Owen (Ian Foreman while he's a kid, he grows into Justice Smith later on) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Payne) meet. Owen is a bit of a drip, Maddy is impossibly, unattainably cool - think Wynona Ryder in Heathers. Also, Owen is in 7th grade, and Maddy is in 9th; that's an almost unsurmountable distance at that age. But bond they do, thanks to an episode guide that Maddy is reading about a TV show called The Pink Opaque.

 The Pink Opaque sits somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Power Rangers, and it's about two girls (Helena Howard and singer Lindsey Jordan) who live thousands of miles away but use their psychic link to fight monsters led by Georges Méliès's man in the moon. Owen's not allowed to watch it, so Maddie smuggles him to her house so they can watch it along with Maddie's girlfriend, and later sends taped episodes to Owen so he remains up to date. They both obsess over the show, which Maddie holds as more real than her own life. 
 And for a while, things seem... good? Except that Maddie, who has a really shitty home life, wants to run away. She tries to enlist Owen, but he chickens out. Maddie shortly disappears, and soon afterwards The Pink Opaque gets cancelled.

 Ten years pass. Owen continues drifting through a... well, it seems like a pretty shitty life, honestly. In one telling moment, he holds a flat screen tv close and tells us that he's formed a family. He did self-identify as liking TV shows when Maddie told him she was a lesbian, after all.

 As Owen sinks into a grey soup of conformity, Maddie comes back, introducing a gnostic twist in the tale.

 Don't go into I Saw The TV Glow expecting a horror movie; There are some creepily effective scenes, but it's best approached as a surrealist fable. A deeply personal, weird, sad fable with overt queer themes.

 There is a plot, of sorts, but it's about as passive and languid as our point of view character. It does go places, eventually, and finds its way to a devastating conclusion... but it takes its sweet time getting there. Schoenbrun's direction is terrific, and captures both being a teen and the seeming pointlessness of adult life remarkably well, using impressionistic tricks like doodling directly on the screen with the scrawled messages Maddie leaves on their VHS tapes, or letting Owen break the fourth wall and narrating what he's going through at us. It sounds unbearable, but the film is carefully crafted so that it eases us into these flourishes; For me, at least, it worked beautifully.

 The budget is modest but it's used well - One of the affordances was that the film is shot in 35mm, which cinematographer Eric K. Yue uses to capture some really stunning shots. The recreations of The Pink Opaque, meanwhile, were either shot on VHS, transferred to it or have been run on some really good filters. It's a great-looking movie, and it sounds great too, thanks to a synth-heavy soundtrack from Alex G. a bunch of indie bands trying to approximate 90's music, plus two excellent covers (Jordan's band Snail Mail does Smashing Pumpkins, and there's an appropriately anthemic version of Broken Social Scene's Anthems for a seventeen year old girl.)

 This is one of those movies that's just too willfully weird to recommend easily - All I can do is to try and communicate how it hit me. Because yes, in case it's not clear, I absolutely think it's worth anyone's time. I love it to pieces.