To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.

The story starts in the 1990s, although like most things in this uncanny world, time doesn’t play by normal rules. A pair of misfit teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), are united in their love for a hokey, supernatural late-night TV series. There’s another thing they share – something Maddy clocks long before Owen does: the suspicion that there is something terribly wrong with the world.

Smith is haunting; there’s a strangulated sadness in his voice, as though the daily business of hauling himself through his existence is choking him. The film has a trans/queer subtext, but it will speak to anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable in their own skin.

• In UK and Irish cinemas