A hypnotic, surreal fever dream of a film, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s (We’re All Going to The World’s Fair) I Saw The TV Glow has future cult classic written all over it in bright pink neon. The setting is the late 1990s, where teenager Owen (Justice Smith) and fellow misfit Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over their shared obsession with a mysterious late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque, which exists in a similar cosily supernatural register to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The film follows Maddy and Owen’s growing relationship through the ‘90s to the early 2000s; but when The Pink Opaque is suddenly cancelled, Maddy disappears. Although reminiscent variously of the work of David Lynch, Gregg Araki, and Richard Kelly, Schoenbrun’s film retains an entirely distinctive character of its own, and is somehow both familiar and utterly unclassifiable.

Notes by David O’Mahony