Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.You don’t need to watch movies at the rate of a critic to see the same tricks played again and again. At the most basic level, sheer novelty is one reason the unclassifiable I Saw The TV Glow is such a jolt. The film feels like a message chalked brightly on a silent nocturnal road: an urgent and surreal communiqué, wrapped in a movie about teenage fandom and the familiar American suburbs.Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is in her thirties, and sets much of her movie in the oft-remembered 1990s. So far, so typically millennial. But her vision of the era is rooted not just in a common pop culture, but something far more singular. We first meet our protagonist, Owen (Justice Smith), as a sad-eyed schoolboy. His place on the margins is defined less by bullies than by solitude. The bullies, like all the other kids, are simply elsewhere.Then along comes Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), two grades older and already privy to another world. She is a devotee of The Pink Opaque — a TV show made for teens but with a scary grown-up edge, aired late enough for Owen to know it only by reputation. Maddy duly brings him into the fold. An illicit sleepover leads to shared years of obsession. The divide between reality, entertainment and private headspace, already fragile, will dissolve completely. The mood is woozy, the aesthetic hyper-vivid, the movie not quite horror but not not horror either. (Schoenbrun, who is trans, has spoken of the film as mirroring her life experience, but all kinds of otherness feel applicable.)If The Pink Opaque recalls the postmodern Nineties fun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, here the clever sparkle of that show refracts into something more like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Even then, the touch of Lynch shows up mostly in the sense that you’re watching someone else’s dream, pulled whole and alive from their psyche. Many moments unnerve, and a few may even alienate, but the sum is grandly and potently itself. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from July 26
