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.
