Review: I Saw the TV Glow

Director:  Jane Schoenbrun

Stars:  Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Amber Benson

When I was a teenager, I had an X-Files episode guide book, in fact I had two. One for both the first and second seasons and another dedicated to just the third. The first was so well-thumbed that I had to sellotape the midsection back in. Those pages stuck out, awkward and chunky, a thick clod in the innards of the book. Still, I combed every page, knew every guest star, memorised the writers and directors of every episode. It was my bible for a show that I made part of my identity. Even now I can recite those details.

In short, being an awkward misfit kid in the ’90s lent itself to such escapism. Finding a place to belong in fantasy mysteries on TV. Rejecting the world that rejected you in favour of another. And just because a few short years later I didn’t have the same books for Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have…

What I’m getting at is that, if Jane Schoenbrun’s latest studies a particular type, I was it. Therefore let’s eschew the ruse of objectivity right here and now (psst, it’s always a ruse); I Saw The TV Glow is a film that spoke to me.

The last time Schoenbrun had a film out in the UK – 2021’s zeitgeist-tapping We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – the majority of us who caught it were cornered into viewing on a laptop screen thanks to the sea changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. That method of viewing turned out acutely fitting for its rabbit-hole into an extremely-online world. World’s Fair is a delicate, lo-fi gem in which the glow of laptops in the dark are part and parcel of the film’s aesthetic. Watching in that way felt participatory.

I Saw the TV Glow is Schoenbrun’s bold – dazzling even – leap forward, finding a home in the US with A24 who pushed the movie into theatres to find screens sized to fit this growing ambition. With intense frustration, the movie’s UK distribution has been squeezed to the margins by colossal MCU dick joke Deadpool & Wolverine. Thus I Saw the TV Glow becomes – for UK viewers – an experience most will likely find on their TVs at some point in the near future.

It might not be the preferable home for the movie (which is gorgeously rendered in a way that shares the same Gregory Crewdson inflected flavour as David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows), but its oddly fitting given the subject matter, and the cult devotion it’ll engender.

Owen (Ian Foreman, later Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) are malcontent teens in the wasteland of American suburbia who are drawn together through a shared fandom for a cult ’90s fantasy show called The Pink Opaque. In the show (which airs on the Young Adults Network at 10:30pm, past Owen’s restrictive bedtime) two imaginary friends, Isabel (Madeline’s Madeline‘s Helena Howard!) and Tara (Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan!) fight the forces of darkness from opposite ends of their state via a psychic plain. Schoenbrun renders the show as a crude, lo-fi, but believably charming product of it’s time (complete with the same credits font as Buffy!), carrying a vibe somewhere at an intersection between Goosebumps and Twin Peaks.

I Saw the TV Glow finds Owen recounting, via anecdotes sometimes delivered direct into camera, the episodic nature of his relationship to both the show and to Maddy, a confidently queer young woman two years his senior. Suspicious of Owen’s motivations, Maddy confronts him one day while they’re sitting on the high school bleachers. When asked if he likes girls or boys, Owen grows squirrelly and replies that he likes TV shows.

But that’s not all he says. This inquisition/confessional seeds much of the second half of the film which, like World’s Fair, is somewhat misleadingly billed as a horror when it reveals itself to be something more insular and personal. Something that doesn’t merely adhere to a genre playbook. Owen scratches the surface of a deeper personal truth while talking to Maddy that day, about his place outside of the heteronormative conventions that typify the world around the two of them. He doesn’t know his place, but he knows he’s out of place.

What I Saw the TV Glow goes on to render so achingly is how art that connects with us can help shape and inform our sense of identity, even if said art itself isn’t explicitly about one thing or another. The adventures we witness on The Pink Opaque aren’t a blunt-force trans allegory, but the show informs Owen’s potentia as a non-binary person in chrysalis form, buried in layers of fear of rejection. The show itself becomes dangerous and quasi-magical, seemingly swallowing Maddy into its void before it’s abrupt cancellation.

Schoenbrun’s narrative dares to jump years, but with good reason, for any show we connect with and devote ourselves to changes with us over time. Looks different from new vantages. Owen has the opportunity to re-watch The Pink Opaque years later when it gets dumped unceremoniously onto streaming. Of course, it doesn’t feel like the same show any longer. Such is the warping of memory, the personalisation of nostalgia. In a manner similar to that seen in World’s Fair, Schoenbrun favours an extended coda that plays like a tapering tragedy. It’ll leave some as lost and bereft as their apologetic protagonist, but its all part and parcel of the intention to convey what it feels like to live a life that doesn’t feel real… or really truthful.

The manner that this – and much more – is communicated reveals what a little more budgetary flex has allowed Schoenbrun to accomplish. This is still an intimately scaled indie film, but there’s an emboldened clarity to every frame and cut, from a hyper-specific design to the lighting throughout to the amount of space that exists with the actors in a scene via the edit.

The cast are often, quietly, amazing. Smith has us in the palm of his hand, communicating an awkwardness and sense of intimidation at the world that stings like a lance in the soft tissue. Lundy-Paine, meanwhile, duly captivates as the glowering, fragile Maddy, bursting forth in the second half with an astonishing monologue performed inside – I’m sorry – an inflatable planetarium (is this a thing??).

As intimated, Schoenbrun nods to their own adolescent obsessions. They know the lingo (“Big Bad”, “Monster of the Week”), the paraphernalia (some many videotapes…). That one of The Pink Opaque’s characters is named Tara seems far from throwaway once Amber Benson makes an all-too-brief appearance. From Twin Peaks they’ve learned the magical space of a local dive bar (here the Double Lunch), understanding how the right musical interlude can help nurture the perfect mood. I Saw the TV Glow is bathed in its own bespoke soundtrack, busy with buzzy young artists referring back fondly to ’90s alternative and shoegaze.

And, also – not insignificantly – Schoenbrun takes and understands the beauty and timelessness of an unsolved mystery. That not-knowing powers devotion, suspends us in a place of helplessness that’s almost euphoric. See also the sense of loss and dislocation when something so formative ends too soon. There’s plenty of toxic fandom out there nowadays, and I’m not saying that such intense obsession with a show doesn’t come with it’s own problems, but Schoenbrun is interested in a different kind of fandom here. An introverted kind that inspires epiphanies.

I Saw the TV Glow is a soft yet barbed nostalgia bubble, one that feels far less tokenistic than our culture’s soup of cash-ins and also-rans because it treats nostalgia seriously and fully, recognising the sadness in it. Blurring fantasy and reality, Owen keeps a profound piece of The Pink Opaque inside of him. It becomes the shimmering core of the person he wishes he had the strength to be. That this is not fully realised feels like this director reaching a hand out to struggling viewers, offering the opportunity to clasp hold and step forward.

I Saw the TV Glow is an overture, an act of reassurance, an invitation for new obsessions (did I imagine a deliberate left-of-frame bias?) and one of the very best films of 2024 so far.