I Saw The TV Glow review: Jane Schoenbrun’s electric film reaches through the screen and never lets go
A dark tale of pop-culture obsession and self-discovery from the filmmaker who brought us We’re All Going To The World’s Fair
Film Reviews Jane Schoenbrun
This review was originally published on March 11, 2024, as part of our coverage of the 2024 South By Southwest film festival.
You will never be as obsessed with anything as an adult the way you were in your teenage years. We’ve all been down that path, crawling down the rabbit hole of a band, a book series, a movie, a video game, until we can’t go any deeper, then huddling there in the enveloping darkness waiting for the light of something else to pull us up and out again. It can be a transformative experience, but stay down in that hole too long and reality starts to bend around that hiding place, until you lose all sense of the way out.
With their previous feature, the excellent We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun charted that kind of obsession in the form of an obscure internet game with potentially dangerous consequences. This time, Schoenbrun gets more personal, and more primally haunting. I Saw The TV Glow is a remarkable portrait of pop-culture obsession—how it can unite us, change us, and ripple down through our entire lives in ways both uplifting and unsettling.
The particular pop-culture obsession dominating I Saw The TV Glow is The Pink Opaque, a supernatural teen drama that airs late on Saturday nights. It follows two best friends united across a long distance by a psychic connection, which helps them battle all manner of monsters. Owen (played by Ian Foreman as a pre-teen and Justice Smith as a high-schooler) is a lonely kid who’s caught glimpses of the show while channel surfing, and is intrigued enough to approach superfan Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) about The Pink Opaque’s true nature. Taken with his eagerness, she invites him over to watch the show one night, beginning a decade-long odyssey that’s perhaps not quite a friendship, but far more than an acquaintance. As Owen and Maddy descend deeper into the show’s fandom, one of them starts to suspect that the show is more than just a half-hour of fiction presented every Saturday night.
Schoenbrun has many gifts as a filmmaker, but one of their most prominent is the ability to enchant even the most mundane of landscapes through lighting, pacing, and sound. The high school Owen and Maddy attend feels like a tiled purgatory, complete with foreboding phrases on the walls and fluorescent light that never seems to reach all the way to the corners of any given space. The streets of their neighborhood are dark voids punctuated by lights which illuminate only the important things in their lives, the things that bring in color—from a strange ice cream truck to neon-chalked sidewalk drawings. The film’s visuals conjure the sense that we’re watching two people adrift in a sea of boring, faded reality, sailing this way and that in search of the connective tissue that will lend meaning to their lives, whether that’s a TV show or a moment of sincerity between the two of them.
But of course, the real meat of I Saw The TV Glow comes as Schoenbrun dials into the transformative nature of their characters’ obsession, which might bring about a metamorphosis or might just be triggering dangerous, numbing dissociative episodes. For both Owen and Maddy, the journey toward trying to figure out what’s real and what’s simply a product of their obsession is a complex one, and the audience might not always be able to follow them down their respective roads. If you’re willing to lean into the film, and follow Schoenbrun’s tone-poem instincts, you’ll find something magical. They’ve charted a narrative that’s simultaneously a tale of a piece of media changing someone’s life and a tale of someone taking the long way ’round to who they really are.
That magic extends to the young cast, led by Smith and Lundy-Paine as two lost people searching for some kind of truth, even if they have to look deep in the bowels of fiction to find it. Their performances are dual engines of unsettling emotion, as hypnotic as the flickering static on a dying TV screen, and they manage the particular tone of Schoenbrun’s script perfectly, placing the viewer in a world that’s not quite our own and yet, especially if you grew up in the ’90s, so real you can almost reach through the screen and touch it.
It won’t be for everyone, but for those that get it, I Saw The TV Glow is proof of Schoenbrun’s place as one of the most exciting, singular voices in horror and genre cinema right now. It’s a triumph of a very particular kind of beautiful darkness, inviting you, much like its characters, to get happily lost in its images.
22 Comments
So what if I “get it” but don’t agree with your analysis?
You know how there’s Oscar-bait movies – movies that pander directly to Hollywood bigshots who run awards ceremonies?
This sounds like a Pop-Culture-Website-Writer-bait movie.
I’m very interested in the movie personally, I just really dislike the concept of “getting it” as an element of critical analysis. I much prefer “divisive”. At least that doesn’t gatekeep by pretending that anyone who comes away with a negative opinion must not understand what they’ve watched.
Would you prefer “If you can get on its wavelength”? Having seen the film, I think it’ll hit 90s kids more squarely than any other audience. As an 80s kid, I recognized a lot of what it’s putting out but maybe not all.
Nope. That’s just a rephrasing of the same sentiment, which is that anyone who can “get on its wavelength” will enjoy it and think it’s good. I’m against the idea that understanding = enjoyment/appreciation. It’s entirely possible for someone to understand a piece of art and still think it doesn’t work. For several reasons. And to repeat myself, I am *interested* in this and will give it a shot. But the review heavily implies that understanding alone is the key to appreciating. It isn’t. And I wish that critics and cinephiles would stop using that as a critical standard. I agree that understanding is important and helps but it’s not a guarantee of anything.
Why do you think you’re the one who won’t get it? Maybe we’re talking about someone else. 🙂
Dweeb Discovers Subjectivity, Hyperbole, Takes it Personally
It’s not a matter of either subjectivity or hyperbole. The concept of “getting it” is a lazy, gatekeeping trope of pseudo-intellectual analysis. Anyone who enjoys a piece of art can deny criticism by falling back on “Well you just didn’t get it.” You’ll notice I didn’t object to “most exciting, singular voices”, which is actual hyperbole.
I get it’s all a semantic nitpick, but yeah I mostly agree. “Getting it” is often positioned too much as inherently having positive feelings towards something, even though you can get the art and not find it persuasive. Especially annoying when this outlook values positive takes that don’t really say anything. An extension of toxic positivity. That said, this film looks interesting, though I didn’t like the last one much.
What exactly is being gatekept? No one is denying criticism here, it’s just to say that it’s not going to be for everyone. It’s not your thing, that’s fine. It’s just silly to take the wording so seriously and personally.
I have seen people who were told “maybe it’s not your thing” take that just as personally.
This looks intriguing, but having found “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” incredibly tedious, I suspect it is not for me.
yeah I’m down for atmospheric vibe horror (I liked Skinamarink a lot), but that one felt like there wasn’t too much substance to the atmosphere.This looks quite a bit better.
If it’s worth anything, I felt similarly about World’s Fair, but at Sundance I caught TV Glow and found it to be excellent. I would encourage you to check it out!
Let’s just be happy that Pete and Pete are still getting work.
Hey, Pete and I are cool, but if Pete ever crosses my path he’s gonna rue the day, lemme tell ya.
If this film doesn’t include at least one Cocteau Twins song, I’m going to be very disappointed.
I got a GLOW notification for this!?
It sounds like this movie shares some DNA with Kelly Link’s short story “Magic For Beginners.” Interested to see how they treat similar themes.
Cast: ……Fred Durst.I’m in!
I am on my bus ride home after seeing a screening of this in San Francisco, and I immediately went to AV club to see their take on it. I absolutely loved this movie. One thing I will say for folks that are skeptical; this is the sort of movie that has a real tightrope act where it can either be atmospheric and heady or it can fall off the line and end up just being pretentious. I’m happy to say that this has just enough wry self-aware humor that it manages to keep that balance in check. Also, it didn’t come off nearly as inscrutable as I feared it would. The presenter himself even said “just enjoy it and understand that stories don’t have to be linear” before starting the film which, to me, kind of sounded like a disclaimer, but it really wasn’t difficult to follow. I will say that there are a couple little artsy scenes in there (I think if they cut the last five minutes from the film, it wouldn’t have harmed anything) but the story wasn’t some bizarre out-there thing that didn’t make sense. I think if you’re even *remotely* interested in it, you should give it a shot and it’ll probably exceed your expectations.
I feel like we watched different movies. Pop culture obsession was definitely not the theme, but the tool for delivering the theme. This is about queerness.