I Saw the TV Glow

Told using a verity of storytelling techniques, this is a curious film that certainly has a potent point to make but somehow it just can't get there. It's all about the relationship between two folks on the periphery of society. "Owen" (Ian Foreman then Justice Smith) lives with his parents whilst "Maddy" (Brigette Lundy-Paine) abides with her indifferent mother. She's a few years older than he, and they initially bond over a television show called "Pink Opaque" that she has been watching for a few seasons, but it's on past his 10.15 bedtime. She makes it pretty clear that her sexual interests lie elsewhere but he, not remotely bothered, just wants to see the show. A sleepover starts the ball rolling on their enigmatic friendship that invites us to consider a range of issues surrounding sexual and gender identity, fluidity and the sometimes quite traumatic effects these can have on people emotionally and psychologically ill-equipped to deal with at a young age. The use of the television series is quite an effective conduit for the theme as it uses the super-natural to instil both an element of fear and an element of the ridiculous - especially the ice cream man and the totally non-menacing "Mr. Malevolent" whose purposes and dynamic evolve as the characters do throughout the narrative. Suddenly, she goes AWOL for ten years then returns to his life with questions to ask and to answer, but is she still the same person and are either of them any more at ease with whom they truly are? It has brief moments to lighten the mood, but for the most part it's quite an intense and slowly paced look at two characters that I just didn't feel I knew. I suspect this may resonate intensely with people dealing with gender identification complexities, but for the rest of us it pointed us in the right direction but then more or less abandons us to infill too much of the personalities of "Owen" and "Maddy" to fit our own expectations or aspirations for them. It's as if auteur Jane Schoenbrun has given us the edge of the jigsaw puzzle and left us to do the rest - without there necessarily being a right way to do it. It also has one or two goes at bringing things to a conclusion - or as much of one as we are to actually have, and that didn't really work for me. I didn't need "the end", but what we did get was a bit frail. It is an intriguing piece of cinema at times, but for me it lost it's way.