For the bulk of its running time, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow feels mislabeled as horror. Sure, it has hallucinatory images of a demonic ice cream cone and Fred Durst is in it, but it isn’t “scary” scary.
Until the end.
Until you realize this is a neon-hued nightmare about being slowly buried alive since the day you were born.
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I Saw the TV Glow is about much, much more than that. But it is also very specifically about that. Still, if you wanted to ignore the gorgeous overt trans allegory, the film remains a captivating exploration of how television can act as a spiritual salve for trauma. Oh, it’s definitely a crutch and a coping mechanism. But Schoenbrun isn’t finger wagging about pop culture addiction so much as celebrating it as a lifeline. Celebrating may be too strong a word for a movie that is deeply, profoundly sad. Then again, it’s also the year’s best so far, so pop a bottle maybe?
The show at the center of I Saw the TV Glow is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s not, but it totally is. It’s technically called The Pink Opaque and follows two teenagers who fight an evil supernatural villain as he sends “freak of the week” monsters after them. High-schooler Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is obsessed with it. When she first meets the younger Owen (Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith), she sees something in him and convinces him to sneak out, come over to her place, and watch the next episode. He isn’t instantly smitten with it so much as he knows immediately that it is important somehow.
Because this is the late 1990s, years before Netflix asked anyone if they were still watching, Maddy records and shares VHS tapes of The Pink Opaque with Owen. He still isn’t allowed to watch. At least in part because his dad dismisses it as a show “for girls.” After a rumor is spread about Maddy, she decides to run away, begging Owen to come with her. He panics. He isn’t ready. She disappears. The show gets canceled. Owen’s mom dies. Deeply, profoundly sad…
A decade later, Owen is working a dead-end job at a movie theater when Maddy reappears and is very different. Maddy explains that The Pink Opaque is real and that Owen is a part of it. The rest feels like it should be revealed by the movie and not a synopsis, but sufficed to say the metaphor is made literal, and the last half hour has far more in common with Beau Is Afraid than anyone could have expected.
That final act is a doozy. It is the kind that makes you immediately want to watch the whole thing again. And why not? It goes down easy, with a soundtrack that summons the very essence of Lilith Fair and a luminous visual flare. Two films in and Schoenbrun has already established a signature style and palate that doesn’t feel like thievery passed off as homage, a la Quentin Taratino or Edgar Wright.
What’s amazing is how perfectly they convey the sense of dread at the core of the narrative. It is claustrophobic and terrifying. Again, while the tragedy has an explicitly trans nature, Schoenbrun taps into universal fears of a life mis-lived, the suffocation of never having been alive in the truest sense. Here, at this awful inflection point where so many seem to be unable to recognize what is at stake for young trans people, what a powerful way to drive home a life-or-death point.
Grade = A+
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Sarah G. Vincent says “Schoenbrun may attract more than studio money, but award accolades with this film. It is the kind of film that will be rewatched obsessively with closed captions on. At least, it will be a cult hit. At most, it will bring a wellspring of healing for movie lovers who did not even recognize that they had wounds.”
Siddhant Adlakha at Mashable says “The film is the disturbing sum of its lingering sensations that burrow their way beneath your skin, refusing to leave even after you’ve left the theater, or once you’ve cried yourself to sleep. But at the same time, its totality — the sheer fact of its existence, as an unbridled, uninhibited expression of the self — is exuberant and overwhelming.”
Deirdre Crimmins at Rue Morgue says “Though it may not be intentional, the greatest strength in Schoenbrun’s films to date is their ability to function like cinematic Rorschach tests. Adolescence and adoration are near-universal experiences, and with the characters given the space to feel big feelings, each viewer can bring their history of these feelings into these films and have their own experience.”