Whilst the slow and meditative pace, neon lighting, and uncomfortable, violent, and deeply metaphoric visuals feel like Refn’s Only God Forgives, the film bares similarity to something like Beau is Afraid in its use of surrealist horror to construct the protagonist’s perspective on the world and emphasise their discomfort with themselves, their gender, and aging/adulthood. The film uses the extreme normality of the setting in a small American town, with references in the mise en scene to a stereotypical American highschool and the Bush/Gore election, to contrast the surreality of all else, with the plot following the protagonist from high school as he befriends a strange, maybe psychotic, girl that tries to get him to run away from home.
The film plays on the mass American cultural immaturity that feels evermore hegemonic, with what Adorno identified as the perfect consumer in an adult with an 11 year old’s mind realised in millennials trying to live vicariously through children’s media to escape their trauma, as the girl introduces him to a monster-of-the-week style show she is obsessive over, and together they impart their trauma into, an amalgamation resulting in a horror show reminiscent of the Power Rangers vs Cookie Monster YouTube video, the plot of which includes the girl’s suicide attempt and the protagonist’s potentially transgender identity.
Whilst after several years when the girl comes back after her escape she attempts to get him to search inside of himself for his true identity, the protagonist misses his opportunity and falls back into a life of cisheteronormativity represented by the villain of the show, who poisons his character and steals her heart, mimicking his abusive father. After building a family and failing to leave the town, his incongruence with the fakest environment on Earth grows into his old age, and after putting off ‘being nonbinary because he has work in the morning’ one too many times, the banality of his pain overcomes him and he has to cut himself open to rekindle the spark of his true self.