David Lynch is the most over-cited comparison in cinema.

But for Jane Schoenbrun, the weird shoe might fit, and Lynch’s influence isn’t the sole component that binds their first two movies. 

2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and this year’s I Saw the TV Glow, now in theaters, are about relationships in which the participants primarily bond/connect through a screen. And over the course of both movies, the screen’s heightened reality begins to bleed into the characters’ corporeal — and psychological — reality, blurring the fluid, porous boundaries.

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P.S. Justice Smith was born to be in Annie Baker’s The Flick.