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I Saw the TV Glow has the kind of ending that sends people running to the internet looking for explainers and conversation — not because they didn’t understand it, exactly, but because they don’t necessarily believe what they just saw. Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a dark movie: dark in the visuals, since so much of it takes place in queasy late-night spaces and dim, muddy interiors, and dark in the narrative specifics, which are not designed to comfort or coddle the viewers. This is not a feel-good film with a pat, heartwarming ending.

But it is a film that seems designed to get under viewers’ skins, and leave them examining their lives and their choices. Schoenbrun invites people to take any lingering discomfort that comes out of the end of the movie, and go do something with it. It’s a call to action, though what exactly “action” means is left wide open. Schoenbrun has a specific intention in mind, but the metaphor here is also broad enough that anyone watching this movie can wrap it tightly around their own lives and their own bodies until it fits for them.

[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for I Saw the TV Glow.]

The movie follows many years in the life of Owen (Ian Foreman in his younger years, Justice Smith thereafter), a hesitant, socially awkward kid who clearly struggles to relate to other people, at school and at home. When he meets hostile, disconnected Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), he manages a tentative connection with her by sharing her fandom for a late-night TV show about teenagers Isabel and Tara, who fight the world’s darkest, most evil forces with their powerful psychic connection. (The show, The Pink Opaque, was inspired in part by Schoenbrun’s childhood obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Eventually, Maddy runs away from home and disappears without a trace, while Owen trudges from high school to early adulthood without shedding any of his adolescent awkwardness. Maddy returns eight years later to

Justice Smith