WARNING: Spoilers ahead for I Saw The TV Glow and Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The lights come up on the closing credits of I Saw the TV Glow. Half of East Oxford’s trans population, myself included, sit in stricken silence. There are tears, slow exhales, tentative hugs to bring people back down to earth. We file into the sunlight and, once we’ve gathered ourselves, head to a Chinese restaurant that had better be ready for 16 sad trans people processing their collective trauma.

There is much technical praise I can, and will, heap on Jane Schoenbrun’s second full length feature. There’s the titular, dreamlike glow of ambient neons and electronics bathing each frame, suffusing everything in perpetual fluorescent twilight. There’s the capital-G Gorgeous soundtrack, backed up by cameos from a coterie of queer indie icons from Snail Mail to Phoebe Bridgers. There’s the production design, a brilliantly evocative palette of SFX jank, static snow and screen fuzz that haunts the media of 90s youth. And there’s the star-making performances from Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine, both of whom deliver absolutely gut-wrenching portrayals of two mixed-up kids finding themselves in their favourite monster-of-the-week serial.

Smith as Owen, whose bond with misfit Maddy over their love of late night cable show The Pink Opaque lands them both in a dimension spanning date with destiny, is maybe one of the best actors I’ve seen at portraying pure, impotent panic. His wide-eyed, quietly stuttering horror, confusion and denial add further pathos to the heartbreaking arc (or lack thereof) on which his character travels. Lundy-Paine, too, moves from a Daria-like monotone of both snark and profound alienation, to an almost animalistic catharsis as they tell Owen of their escape to another world, and their desperation for ‘him’ to join them as ‘his’ true self.

Those quotation marks are very deliberate. While I will say you don’t have to be trans to ‘get’ I Saw the TV Glow, you will certainly get more out of it if you are. So much of this film is about seeking out and creating places of safety or escape - in the silk folds of a play parachute, the red warmth of the high-school darkroom, or the glow from a TV playing a show in which you see yourself reflected back. Safe in the temporary haven of Maddy’s room, free to watch the show ‘his’ father dismissed as ‘for girls’, Owen discovers ‘he’ has more in common with protagonist Isabel than ‘he’ knows.

This movie might be mysterious, but it is not subtle about its trans allegories. One of our opening shots is literally a young Owen standing under the trans Pride flag colours. The only time we ever see ‘him’ smile is when ‘he’ shyly emerges from Maddy’s bathroom wearing one of their dresses. The twin validation and terror of feeling ‘seen’ by something we watch for the first time, the finding of community in the dark corners of underground media - from furtively traded cassette tapes all the way to modern internet forums - is a experience that still rings true for many trans people, and for trans women, certainly, this will be a significantly harder watch.

There’s a lot of love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this picture. Title credits use the same font; one of The Pink Opaque’s protagonists is named Tara; there’s even an Amber Benson cameo that made me squeal. For many young queers, Tara and Willow would have been the first lesbian couple they’d seen on a mainstream show, and it’s no coincidence that I Saw the TV Glow draws on this affinity for Owen discovering ‘his’ own identity. But fans of Buffy that recall the season 5 finale will also feel a chill at this film’s themes of burial, sacrifice, death and rebirth (Buffy spoilers incoming, sorry). When Buffy sacrifices herself, plunging into the mouth of hell, her reward is heaven. That is, until she is forcibly resurrected in season 6’s premiere, an act that leaves her with an all-consuming depression, as well as a lingering mistrust of a world that just couldn’t let her old self go.

The person Owen knows as Maddy doesn’t exactly live in Paradise when they cross paths again - in fact, they’ve clearly been through hell and back. But in burying a version of themself that never sat right with them, they are finally free. It is easy to look at them and think to live like this is too much of an ask. But it’s the easiness that kills you while your heart still beats.

This is a trans horror story, but refreshingly, none of the horror centres on the brutalisation of trans bodies, as often favoured by lazy cis directors. There’s body-horror, especially in the Cronenbergian final sequence, but that’s not where the real terror lies either. No, the true dread, the one that claws at your insides and steals the air from your lungs, is that of the road not taken. It’s the numb powerlessness of watching a character in a horror movie make all the wrong moves as the big bad moves ever closer, but the big bad is your own denial, your own refusal to risk living as someone that can breathe freely, if more dangerously, at last. There is still time.