Fleapit revisited:I Saw The TV Glow.

Remember how much your favourite TV shows used to mean to you when you were a kid? Especially, if you were a kid that didn't fit in. You could find solace and comfort in that half-hour or so per week, pre-streaming, when the show aired. Sometimes the show could feel more real than life itself. At least for some people.

Two such people are students Owen (Justice Smith, Ian Foreman-Young as his younger self) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). In Jane Schoenbrun's new film, I Saw The TV Glow, they find themselves attracted to each other (platonically, Maddy's into girls, Owen's not into girls - or boys - just TV shows) when Maddy turns Owen on to her favourite programme, The Pink Opaque.

Which Owen isn't allowed to watch because his mum, Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler), says it's past his bedtime and his dad, Frank (Fred Durst, yes that one, don't worry, he doesn't do much actual acting), says it's "for girls". So Owen devises a cunning plan to kid his parents into thinking he's having a sleepover at a friends' place while actually watching The Pink Opaque with Maddy. Later she tapes episodes and passes them on to him. It is the nineties.

It must be said, however, that The Pink Opaque looks utter shit. The premise is that two young women, Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan - who records as indie rock artist Snail Mail), are connected via a 'psychic plane' and must evade the capture of Mr Melancholy (Emma Portner, who plays a few other minor roles too) who sends various foes, killer clowns for example - plus an evil ice cream cone man that turns children into lollipops, out to fight them each week. Mr Melancholy's regularly thwarted plan is to trap them in the 'midnight realm' and force them to drink 'luna juice'. Though, to be fair to him, he does up his game as The Pink Opaque reaches season five.

Mr Melancholy himself is a gurning lunar buffoon. The Moon from The Mighty Boosh as if reimagined by David Lynch after ten bottles of cough mixture. It's hard to see what the obsession is for Maddy and Owen with The Pink Opaque but the obsession is most definitely there. While Owen is your everyday oddball, Maddy is a stronger brew. She's allowed to stay up as late as she likes but her stepdad (whom we never see) apparently beats her and she's desperate to escape the generic suburbia that her and Owen share.

Which, eventually, she does. She tries to persuade Owen to go with her but after careful consideration Owen decides he actually quite likes his life. So Maddy disappears. On the night she goes missing a burning television is found in her garden and the last ever episode of The Pink Opaque airs. Are the snow globes a clue? What about the Pink Opaque logo that looks like one of the ghosts from Pac-Man?

Eight years later, Owen is working at a movie theatre when he runs into Maddy. She's back but where has she been for the best part of a decade and why has she come back? They're the questions he has for her but she has questions for him and they're not quite so easy to answer? Maddy reveals what happened in those missing years and what she wants from Owen now (at a goth club on the outskirts of town where a Marilyn Manson wannabe performs as well as the actual Phoebe Bridgers).

Much of it is, quite frankly, ludicrous though a lot of it is, also - simultaneously, pretty disturbing. At one point, and during one of the most ridiculous scenes of all, I actually felt a chill shoot up my back. I'm not sure you could describe I Saw The TV Glow as a straight out horror but it certainly has horror elements and these work pretty well after a fashion.

It's an uneven film but it's an unpredictable one too. It's never boring and you can never quite guess where it might be going next. I'd recommend a watch of I Saw The TV Glow but as for The Pink Opaque? It might be best to leave that one consigned to fictional history.