Hot studio A24’s latest hyped horror is short on gore, long on vibes

I SAW THE TV GLOW ★★★½
(M) 100 minutes

How elevated can a horror movie be? Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is dense with allusion yet threatens to float away from its genre moorings altogether – short on gore, long on vibes and closer in spirit to angsty tone poems such as The Virgin Suicides and Moonlight than to anything meant to be scary.

Naturally, it’s brought to us by A24, the boutique US production house known for hip fusions of pop and art-house cinema (including the Oscar triumph of Everything Everywhere All at Once). Naturally, it’s set in the recent past – at least if “recent” stretches as far back as the mid-’90s, when suburban high-school misfits Owen (Ian Foreman) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over their love of supernatural TV show The Pink Opaque.

Named for a Cocteau Twins album and screened late at night on a young-adult cable channel, this imagined object of cult devotion is a mood board, as well as an emblem of the pre-internet era when even mainstream pop culture could feel like a cherished secret. The primary reference points are Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the opening titles even use Buffy’s mock-classical font). But there are echoes of everything from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to Matthew Barney-style performance art.

There’s also a dash of Charmed to the premise, involving two teenage girls who team up to fight evil through telepathy while rarely meeting in person. Mirroring this in the larger fiction of the film is the duo of Owen and Maddy, who bond during a single fateful sleepover then communicate mainly through the medium of VHS tapes (secretly passed from Maddy to Owen, who isn’t allowed to stay up and watch).

Their connection isn’t a romantic one in any usual sense. “I like girls, not boys,” Maddy tells her younger protege, in case he gets the wrong idea. Even so, there’s a degree of wiggle room: perhaps she could like Owen differently if he were a girl.

As for Owen, he isn’t sure what he likes, except for TV shows. Midway through the film he grows up to be played by Justice Smith (Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves), who occasionally narrates directly to the camera. But Smith speaks in a version of the same hoarse, halting voice, as if the character were trapped forever on the cusp of adulthood.

This performance is of a piece with the willed stiffness that is the flipside of the film’s no less calculated dreaminess (the soundtrack, mostly specially commissioned original songs, adds yet another layer of reference and pastiche). Bent on generating a fandom of its own, I Saw the TV Glow is designed as a reverie you can sink into – but while the colours may shimmer, the lateral tracking shots and fussily symmetrical compositions hint that the shades of the prison house are closing in.

The power of I Saw the TV Glow lies precisely in its ambiguity, which may go deeper than was intended. Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, has spoken of the film as a metaphor for the discovery of transgender identity, an idea sometimes underlined to the point where it almost ceases to be metaphoric.

But this isn’t the only way to understand the story, which presents its characters with an impossible choice: settling for stifling suburban conformity, or following the dream of The Pink Opaque into a realm that looks a lot like destructive mental illness.

Perhaps what the film is really saying is that identity always depends on embracing fantasy of one kind or another. Which, on reflection, might be scary enough.

I Saw the TV Glow is released in cinemas on August 29.

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