You suffocate, then you learn how to breathe again.

Jane Schoenbrun’s magnificent I Saw the TV Glow is a suburban-set semi-hallucinatory, semi-body horror piece of magical realism. Yet the film feels definitively lucid, articulating with striking poise a story about fluid identity and the repressive external forces that work to render that fluidity categorical. It is also a film whose body horror elements (which are quite minimal to the eyes of a frequent horror viewer) should not scare away the squeamish. Indeed, much of the horror regarding the body involves deeply conflicted and isolating internal states, as opposed to buckets of blood.

As for the magical realism, it is the icing on this hazy, flickering cake. Aided by an effectively moody soundtrack and some evocative imagery, Schoenbrun produces a film that feels otherworldly but that also never leaves the ground. The bitter reality of the passage of time in monotonous suburbia is never eclipsed by the eerie lo-fi glow of the mid-90s television program whose existence takes over the lives of the film’s two main characters, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine).

This show, “The Pink Opaque,” is a send-up of both monster of the week science fiction in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The X-Files and the horror-lite young adult shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? The characters in the show, Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), use telepathic powers to fight against the forces of the malevolent lunar force known as Mr. Melancholy, a villain who is at once a perfectly cheesy riff on Georges Méliès and a not-to-subtle hint at what the over-arching emotional tenor of the film will be.

Owen and Maddy are both obsessed with the show. The show airs past Owen’s bedtime (and his aggressive father refuses to budge on this point), so Maddy leaves him VHS recordings of the show in the dark room at their high school. The pair bond over the show in that awkward misfit teen way. The soft-spoken Owen is able to use the show as a conduit to communication; the blunt Maddy can use the show to safely experience and express deep emotions that are otherwise buried in her ostracizing daily life. We see the characters produce different emotional reactions to the show, but the show provides both of them a pleasing, artificial buffer from a tangible world that they believe doesn’t understand them (from everything we’re shown, this world doesn’t give them much reason to believe otherwise).

Eventually, the show is cancelled. And the teenagers grow up. The show is left on an unresolved cliffhanger in its fifth season finale: the two heroines are at the apex of their “dark night of the soul” moment, with their hearts literally ripped out of their chests by Mr. Melancholy. Isabel is made to forget her past and her identity, so that she will no longer serve as a threat to Mr. Melancholy. In real life, Maddy asks Owen to run away with her. When he cracks from fear and stays behind, Maddy disappears and stays gone for almost a decade. In the interim, Owen gets a deadend job at the local movie theater and continues living with his father (despite never clearly seeing the character’s face, the father is played quite sinisterly by former Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst). He leaves the show behind and lets his life succumb to monotony.

But one night, he discovers something strange on an empty highway near a downed power line: ripped up pages from an episode guide for “The Pink Opaque” (including guides for episodes from a sixth season that were never made). Then, Maddy re-enters his life, and Owen is asked to question not only his past and what he has become in his present, but also the possibility that all of that is based on a false reality.

What is so striking about Owen’s character is not only his quiet and complex relationship with his own identity, but also his inability to face those complexities within himself. The film depicts someone suffocated by the presumed identity placed upon him by the outside world, who tiptoes around what life could be like outside of the closet, but ultimately someone who remains inside. Early in the film, Owen describes a fear that there is nothing inside of him – a meaningful parallel to the heart removal plot in the final episode of “The Pink Opaque.” Owen is even more afraid to look inside himself to see whether there is a heart inside or not. Through his friendship with Maddy, he comes closer to crossing that metaphysical threshold into self-reflection and actualization. But this is cut short by Maddy’s abrupt disappearance.

Schoenbrun’s discussions of gender fluidity and trans identity becomes even more explicit (yet still technically metaphorical) with Maddy’s vivid and enthralling description of transformation, of digging out of the dirt and coming out on the other side of all the repression. Lundy-Paine performs the monologue in a heightened register that may be off-putting to some viewers, but which I feel is perfectly fitting for the moment.

When it comes to describing performances, I’ve made attempts to cut the words “revelation” and “revelatory” from my critical lexicon. It feels too hokey, even as I gladly slip into hokum from time-to-time just for the kicks. Here, though, Lundy-Paine deserves some form of “revelation” title, as their performance reveals so much, and in such dramatic fashion, without ever losing sight of the character’s human characteristics. Without divulging too much of the film’s latter half, let’s just say that the character could’ve slipped into the clichéd stock type of the person who has lost their grip on reality. Even if that might be true at the textual level (it seems ambiguous enough to me), viewers sympathizing and relating to Maddy from the start will certainly not lose sight of the character in these later moments.

Smith is similarly fantastic as Owen (the performance of his character’s younger self by Ian Foreman is also worth noting). He spends most of the film bottled up, but his face occasionally betrays inner feelings that Owen is unable to express. When his face betrays nothing, this too is a meaningful acting choice. In one specific and pivotal instance, Smith’s reaction shot is enigmatic and much more difficult to parse in a way that is haunting and may stick with you. Smith channels inaction and a profound inability to understand and articulate oneself in a boldly affecting way.

Glow dutifully carries the banner for the media meta-textuality that colors much of the contemporary media space – to oversimplify it, our interaction with media bleeds into the media itself. But the beating heart of the film is not empty reflexive nods toward the spectator’s love of media. This reflexivity acts as a conduit (as media often does) to the characters’ paths of self-discovery. Representing the idea that the media we consume shapes who we are can easily (and often does) go horribly wrong and become sickly cloying.

Not so here. Considering where this film leaves us in the end – the ending is one of the more audacious I’ve seen in a theatrical release, as it eschews narrative convention entirely – there is very little about the journey of Glow that comes off as cloying. Schoenbrun litters the film with references to change, to transformation, to something slightly more real existing beyond the bounds of one’s current lived experience. But we end the film firmly within those bounds of the less-than-real real. This is not to say the ending is wholly a downer. As I read it, the magical realism can only take these characters so far. It allows them to discover things about themselves, but it is never going to whisk them away to a world without the external complications that come with these discoveries. (Again, avoiding major plot points as best as I can), the fact that the film ends on an apology speaks volumes about this experience.

I Saw the TV Glow is the best new film I’ve seen in a very long time. I say this without understatement, yet I also admit the film’s relative inaccessibility. Some will relate to the stories of these two characters on a much deeper level than I did (and I related quite deeply). Others will likely struggle to access them from an emotional standpoint. And I believe the film requires this emotional bond to succeed beyond being an evocative audio-visual patina or a media-about-media love letter.

If you do find it, the bond is strong.

I Saw the TV Glow: A

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)