I Saw the TV Glow

Barely a horror film and one of the most upsetting things on this site.

Two teenagers in the 1990s bond over a late-night young-adult television series called The Pink Opaque. One of them believes the show is real. The other does not follow her.

Jane Schoenbrun made a film about egg-crack denial and a life not lived, and it works as horror because the thing being described is a person burying themselves alive over decades and the film shows you every year of it.

The chalk on the pavement, the suburban cul-de-sac lighting, and Justice Smith's performance in the last twenty minutes, apologising to strangers in a fluorescent-lit room, are devastating.

It is slow, it is oblique, and a lot of people bounce off it entirely. For the people it is for, nothing else is close.