movie-theater

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

I clicked on this expecting some unfunny Stranger Things parody and instead I got Scott Pilgrim + The Warriors + every Tarantino film. Based on those expectations, it was surprisingly good, even if it’s all been done a thousand times before.