There’s a deeply haunting cautionary tale at the heart of Jane Schoenbrun’s startling distinctive, queer-horror-fantasy mash-up which is to be highly applauded. Less commendable is that it comes within a story delivered with such relentlessly heavy melancholia, you might just tune out to avoid a downer.
It’s 1996 and introverted misfit Owen (Ian Foreman) is studying in seventh grade at Void High somewhere in the typically nondescript US burbs (presumably, and appropriately, a town called Void). Although it is also strangely a neighbourhood with a day-glo ice-cream van lingering in a cloud of dry ice and neon at night, as well as other spookily surreal sights.
At school Owen spots older, clearly outsider emo girl Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading an episode guide to The Pink Opaque, a low-budget, Buffy-esque TV show about two telepathic girlfriends who battle the evil Mr Melancholy and his monsters every Saturday night at 10.30pm.
Entranced by its mysterious promise, Owen sneaks away from his strict parents to watch a new episode at Maddy’s house. Fast-forward two years and Owen (now played by Justice Smith) is utterly obsessed with The Pink Opaque. With a home curfew, Maddy sends him weekly VHS tapes of the show, which the pair bond over as if their entire existences depended on it.
Threading Maddy and Owen yet more tightly together, and interwoven with the characters in The Pink Opaque, are their burgeoning sexual identities. Maddy lets Owen know her preference for girls, whereas his confused, telling reply is: “I don’t know if I like girls. I think I like TV shows.”
Maddy wants to run away (“I’ll die if I stay here”) and take Owen with her. He hesitates, weakly. And then suddenly, simultaneously, Maddy disappears off the face of the planet and The Pink Opaque is cancelled. All that remains is Maddy’s television in flames. Hmmm… *puts thinky finger and thumb on chin* What exactly is going on there...?
There’s more fast-forwarding (quite a few years at a time), plenty of Owen living quite the shit, morose life. Smith plays him excellently, but Owen is just so heart-breakingly unfulfilled. It’s almost too much to watch. Come on, we’ve seen those jump-cut glimmers of you in a dress, please, please find yourself.
That’s only the half of it, and the rest is (predictably) surprising, so let’s not ruin it. But as said, it’s bloody gloomy, right down to the score, which is like a Sofia Coppola soundtrack where all the wistful dreaminess has been replaced by anguished miserabilism.
There’s a desperately important moral to this film: however weird or scary being your true self is, take your chance when you get it or you’ll be even more f***ed. Perhaps for life.
Sadly, and here’s where more caution is advised, it’s a lesson told in a manner likely to elicit either declarations of “instant classic” or, over here in this seat, “swift turn-off”.
