I watched this at the independent cinema on the 9th of August, 2024.
I- it really made me think about things I haven’t thought about in a long time. It’s about a couple of kids who start watching a TV show in the late 90s, called The Pink Opaque. It’s a monster of the week paranormal show: two girls, across a county, who fight incursions into our world from the big bad, Mr Melancholy.
The depiction of young fandom, of desperately grasping onto fiction as escape from the world until it seems more real to you than your life, was so painfully and wonderfully done. You can tell whoever made it was one of those kids. It made me think of books I used to read as a kid, in a way I haven’t thought about them in years, not as critical analysis nor through the cloudy miasma that now surrounds them, but as the original books and my losing myself in them, carrying these characters and ideas around like a flame keeping me breathing.
The movie morphs, when the characters grow older. There were two readings. The first is the supernatural one that is presented: the TV show is real, and the characters in the movie are really the characters from the TV show, trapped in a limbo called the Midnight Realm, which masquerades as the real world. The girl, Maddie, is really Isabel, one of the main characters from the show. When Maddie disappears, right as the TV show ends, she goes to another city, and spends years there like seconds, with a sense of wrongness about everything. In desperation she makes someone bury her alive, and after an indeterminate time she claws her way out of the coffin, only to find herself in the TV world, which was the real world all along, where Mr Melancholy will win unless she comes back to the Midnight Realm and rescues the other main character of the movie, by burying him alive, voluntarily.
He refuses, she vanishes, and he spends the rest of his life wondering if she was right. The movie ends with him old and frail, working at a soft play centre. During a birthday party, he screams in agony, that he is dying, but everyone around him freezes, not noticing his pain. In the bathroom, he cuts his chest open, revealing a TV screen, and he smiles, recognising that Maddie was right, that he in reality is a young, beautiful, powerful heroine, and his present state is because he has been trapped like this. He emerges, apologising nervously to the indifferent patrons.
This interpretation of the movie is wonderful in its own right. The cinematography warps throughout, playing with our senses of what is the metafictional TV show and what is the movie, and the concept of these kids being trapped in purgatory, which to us is our real world, is well done. There’s a scene near the end where the boy, now an old man, finds The Pink Opaque on Netflix, but finds it to be cheesy, poorly done, and meaningless, nothing like the terrifying, dark, hidden, magical thing he remembers. In the surface interpretation, this is because Mr Melancholy wiped his memories and replaced them with the ones he remembers from his life, in order to make him forget that in the “real” world, he is dying.
However, this, and other parts, lead to the second interpretation, of disillusionment, nihilism, and the point of fiction and art. In this reading, the kids are struggling - both have abusive parents, both are ostracised and friendless, and both latch onto this show as a source of meaning, escapism, and power. They become obsessed. When Maddie disappears, she runs away to another city, where she spends years and years in drudgery and meaningless jobs, and, convinced that something is terribly wrong, she pays someone to bury her alive unknowingly. In the coffin, she hallucinates emerging into the TV world, and then manages to claw her way back out of the grave. She comes back to the boy, but when he refuses, she either vanishes, or succeeds in killing herself, delusionally attempting to return to the TV world.
He grows old, still plagued by this feeling of wrongness, that he is not who he seems to be. In his old age, he hallucinates (or we are shown metaphorically) the glowing TV screen in his chest, which means simply that this fantasy, this dream, keeps him going. When he emerges, apologising, he has reconciled himself to the fact that he will live with this wrongness, kept alive and inspired by the dream within him.
It really hit its mark. That sense of something carrying you forward, the power of a fantasy, of an immutable, imperfect but magically different world with characters who seem realer and friendlier to you than anyone you know in real life, their ability to reassure and be present—it’s carried me forward at times in much the same way.
After the movie I wandered around the town in the summer evening air for a while. Everything seemed a bit realer - the colours more intense, the wafting air more present. I was thinking about all of that, about what those books (not TV shows, for me) meant when I was a child, those characters, dulled and misty through time and their burdening with comment and fandom, but still bright and burnished at their core, ready for me to talk to again.
I don’t think I could read the books again. You only ever read any book once, and that’s even more true for those you read as a child. If the choice is between a blazing golden memory or the faint echo in a reread, I’d choose the former.
After some reading, I found it was also a trans allegory - the boy feels something is wrong, and in the fantasy, he’s a strong, magical girl, and his ageing is meant to show how his repression of his identity is slowly killing him because he refuses to accept the truth. I see the evidence for it, but for me personally it has less of an impact than the second interpretation above.
The music absolutely slaps, the visuals are great, it’s alternately 90s vaporwave blurry neon child yearning and tense psychological thriller. Great movie.