Despite the film poster clearly evoking Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), this is not a horror film. Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature film indeed deals with paranormal phenomena, but there’s nothing scary about it. Instead, the 37-year-old director opts for a colourful, hallucinatory ride, mirroring the state of the two protagonists. Their minds progressively disintegrate after their favourite television show gets suddenly cancelled, and their lives are violently torn apart.

The story begins in the year of 1996. Warm and gullible high school student Owen (Ian Foreman) befriends the slightly older, a lot colder and more experienced Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). They spend cosy nights together watching The Pink Opaque, a late night show featuring colourful monsters and bizarre folklore. It looks like creepy children’s television, the Teletubbies on acid, yet we are reliably informed that the attraction is aimed at young adults. Owen becomes fascinated by the creatures on the screen. Both the television and his large innocent eyes glow with joy and excitement. From that point on, the narrative blends the real with the magic and the allegorical, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish actual developments from the concoctions of the teenage mind. Images explode with colours, textures melt, and backgrounds shift shape. Owen is magically entranced and delirious. His head is foggy – much like a snow globe that’s been vigorously shaken. Yet there are no narcotics at play. This is television-induced psychedelia.

Parallel to Owen’s own journey is the story inside The Pink Opaque. Two telepathically conjoined girls fend off the bad guys. One of the villains is named Mr Melancholy, who is shaped more or less like Georges Méliès’s iconic moon. Or perhaps it is inspired by the artwork of the Smashing Pumpkins’s Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, a best-selling music album in the United States in that very year. It looks very silly and infantilised, yet infused with queer sensibility, thus allowing for a subtle debate on gender and sexuality. Maddy questions whether Owen likes boys. He briefly blushes, before retorting: “I like television”. In a fantasy world, you can be anything you want. The co-director Jane Schoenbrun is no stranger to sobering and intimate journeys: she came out as transfeminine a few years ago, after signing as Dan for many years.

The rest of the story takes place eight years later (in 2004) and then in the present day (2024), after a seemingly inexplicable event violently uprooted Maddy from fertile soil of Owen’s imagination. They meet again, yet the circumstances have changed dramatically. In a way, the tables have turned. Owen is a confident adult, and Maddy became stuck in the adolescent mind. Ultimately, this is a movie about the trappings of unbridled and cathartic imagination. A heartwarming watch, even if the dreamy aesthetics are a little derivative, and the pretensions a little bromidic. This is not a game-changer.

The colour palette is vivid and plush, with highly saturated colours prevailing, and abundant artificial lighting (particularly pink and blue). Aesthetically, it sits somewhere between David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977), minus the graphic violence. It also shares the topic of television osmosis with the former (in other words, a character and a television device assimilate/ingest one another). On the other hand, I Saw the TV Glow is an uplifting fable, populated with feel-good, emo adolescent guitar songs. A little sweet, a little nutty. These flavours are crafted in order to please the palate of young film lovers.

I Saw the TV Glow showed in the 2nd edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival, in Malta, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas on Friday, July 26th.