Otherwise, It's an aesthetic dreamscape, has an OST immediately earned as a cultural touchstone before release, and a profound meditation on that feeling of being out of place, afraid, and alone. I found myself thinking a lot about how the two friends represent the polarizations of a socially-bruised personality (ever more appropriate as we get further into internet culture) - Brigette Lundy-Paine playing the person, like her show-equivalent, who feels like she 'knows her self' and wants to participate and create experience and yet she'll keep moving and running because nothing is good enough; while for Ian Foreman's Owen, only "nothing" is good enough, perpetually afraid of participation, finding out who he 'is' inside, or deviating from the path assigned to him. Plus, the way culture can feel like the safest, even-necessary way to form human connections, but it too is fleeting as nostalgia carries its own form of loss - though the passing of cultural objects as inherently meaningful, expressed with a sublime tracking shot over Caroline Polachek's song, gently challenges this assertion as mutually exclusive from other value, and also makes it an art product for Gen X in many ways.
The two have as many similarities as differences - in their home lives, how they connect deeply to media, the drive to avoid or run from dysphoria as well as to run to whatever marker of safety is there (solitude, a TV show), and ultimately a differentiation of outcomes based on their journeys and personalities: Is it a question of leaning into faith as profitable, or derealization as problematic? Possibly both and their opposites. This film has one of the most optimistic endings to a movie I've ever seen, before Schoenbrun refuses to end their film on a cathartic, unambiguous Win and arguably gives us one of the most depressing. Like their last film, I choose to look at it as both, and everything in between -
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though the implication that Owen doesn't change as time slips by, despite all the 'things' he accumulates (including, apparently, a family?), says a lot I don't want to hear, but maybe I need to.
The movie is also - and this isn't really a spoiler, but.. - an anti-horror movie, in that
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Owen bolts and hides from any opportunity to engage in the extroverted activity that may lead to 'horror'. Its anti-climax is its climax, as Owen has his own compromised experience of self-discovery that's fleeting, but we don't get in on the fun because it's his story more than Maddy's. And yet it's (or, at least I find it) so cathartic to stew with Owen, and share in that challenging experience. Schoenbrun doesn't cop out, and that might mean that a lot of people walk away unhappy, but it's true to the themes and the character.
