The sensation of being at the edge of a personal revelation can be at once terrifying and beautiful. Words, heavy with possibility, are placed at the tip of your tongue. Once they escape, they can never be put back.

This is the line that Jane Schoenbrun’s toes in her second feature I Saw The TV Glow, where the psychological horror doesn’t come from autonomy that is stripped away, but rather from the weight of having full responsibility and control over your life, and the fear of having wasted that autonomy by lying to yourself. The specific type of dread that comes from the possibility of self-destruction doesn’t need to be communicated by gore or jumpscares—in this space, static suburbia can be made threatening by its own ambiguous familiarity. A father staring, blank faced, while canned laughter spills from the TV set. A fallen powerline slithers and sparks across the road, spewing pages from a half-remembered book. An ice-cream truck watches from the sidelines. You don’t have to go far.

Owen, played by Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith, is a painfully reclusive and sheltered teenager. His sickly and quiet mother is constantly frustrated in her attempts to connect with her son, and Owen’s looming and mostly silent father (Fred Durst) furthers his isolation by belittling his ‘girly’ interests. Owen’s interactions are halting, uncomfortable, and laden with a kind of resigned despair, as though he’s already accepted that it is easier, with the rough hand he has been dealt, to navigate the world as a non-person than to experience the pain of being trapped. He bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), an equally ostracised peer a few years older, over their love of the TV show The Pink Opaque. There’s a specific type of obsession unique to adolescence that Lundy-Paine communicates with raw, clumsy intensity — that feeling of trying to show someone how a piece of media you love has changed your life, the awkwardness in the gap between wanting to be understood, and the limitations of putting feelings into words. To Maddy and Owen, The Pink Opaque is a lifeline — from their alienated, pre-internet suburbia, on the other side of the screen, suspiciously relatable, overpowered heroines fight the same monsters of the week portrayed the way you remember them being when you were a kid: unintentionally terrifying on first impression; innocuous when revisited in adulthood. 

I Saw the TV Glow is refreshingly explicit about its connection to trans experience and dysphoria, but it conveys this in a broad, metaphorical sense in such a unique way that seems like something of a formal miracle. The word ‘trans’ is never said, but the pervading sense of wrongness that Maddy and Owen feel is overwhelming in its intensity, conveyed by a grainy, analogue frame of neon light and a soft shoegaze soundtrack that imbues each moment with nostalgia, regret, and unease. Scribbled pink time cards and Owen’s matter of fact fourth wall breaking often abruptly adopt the tone and pace of kitschy millennial coming-of-age stories. But the school corridors are dark and vacant, and the arcade and movie theatre are silent. Owen’s addresses to the camera don’t create a sense of intimacy or triviality so much as they feel controlling, false, and disturbingly out of place. Instead of subverting genre tropes, Schoenbrun lets them function as a trapping of their own, an empty nostalgia prison that Owen has chosen to embrace. Though the film provides the setup and texture of a much happier story, Schoenbrun takes a calculated step back by portraying a protagonist whose story is unambiguously self-destructive, refusing the call up to the last frame. 

Time moves differently in the suburbs, certain images moving slowly, ingraining themselves into the fabric of the film, others skipped entirely or only present for a moment, making it feel like you are constantly missing something. In Schoenbrun’s suburban nightmare, years don’t pass in seconds; they have already passed, unseen, by the time Owen takes the time to look back. His story is always in the rear view, always, in his mind, observed too late to change anything. The true devastation comes from our experience as the helpless viewer on the other side of the screen, who knows that Owen is wrong. There is still time, a chalk mural proclaims before the film moves towards the final act, a statement that seems more directed at the audience than at Owen, whose back is turned to the words and who certainly does not take them to heart. There is still time for us, the film warns, but here is what can and will happen if you choose to let time run away. It might not be too late now, but life is not endless. One day, the chalk words on the road will be wrong. 

To me, what makes Schoenbrun’s film truly singular is its refusal to shy away from the true consequences of self-repression. No Hero’s Journey does passive participation in real life make — not everything will be okay, unless you work to make it so. Here is a film so intimate and specific that it will make some people cry in the cinema and stare blankly out the window on the drive home; here is also a film that humanises the still deeply taboo topic of dysphoria by pointing out the simple truth: if you want to change who you are, you can. There is still time. 

Within Schoenbrun’s precise, familiar imagining of queer possibility, there is hope, and there is despair, dancing around each other, creating a picture that is at once horrifying and beautiful. Go see their film, if you can, in an empty cinema, where the light from the screen can set your face aglow.