Review: I SAW THE TV GLOW

Detached teenagers, Owen and Maddy, bond over the young adult tv show The Pink Opaque. It's the mid-'90s when you could buy attractively presented episode guides for things like The X-Files or Friends. The Pink Opaque is so close to Buffy that even the use of the Joss Whedon credits font feels like it's dancing on the edge of a lawsuit. The two are drawn closer together when Owen begs off his too early bedtime by claiming a sleepover date with a friend before turning up at Maddy's to watch it for the first time. The rest is a fragile slowburn about loneliness, identification and youth and the fragments of culture we keep pocketed in later life.

But it's more than that. Both friends are holding back forces within themselves which, if exposed might lead to disaster in their community. Maddy is the older and more determined of the two and when she asks Owen to join her in escaping the town, he demurs and stays behind to years of not knowing Maddy's fate. He retreats into his life, getting a job that neither demands much from him nor bothers him enough for him to make a similar break, though still haunted by Maddy's disappearance. The life ahead looks long, dark and safe and he is nagged by its softness.

Jane Schoenbrun's follow up to the quietly disturbing We're All Going to the World's Fair forms the second instalment of a projected trilogy about the dark and damaging aspects of early life and its complications. So far these two films only look and feel like each other but progress in parallel rather than join to a timeline. They both choose a gentle lurking abstraction beneath a spare narrative and could not be further from the teen fare of the '80s and '90s. Schoenbrun makes the magical weave with the confrontingly real seem effortless. She is helped in this by a dreamy pallet of purples and pinks and nightscapes but also the magnetic performance of Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy whose intensity holds back oceans, and Justice Smith as Owen who must convey the lack and longing of most of the screen time with his Thoreau-like quiet desperation.

This film reminds me of two things and both are good. Seeing at the cinema brought back the thrill of going to see new independent films at places like the Valhalla in the'80s with it's bold colours and message of expression. And it made me think of the best of those short stories that are only about ten pages but feel as heavy as whole novels. This film is hard to describe justly and it will not be for everyone, but if you were one of those readers who finished one of those stories with a sigh and a need to go and stare at the sky for a while, you might well fall in love with it.