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A24’s I Saw the TV Glow from writer / director Jane Schoenbrun is a brilliant exploration of how people can find and lose themselves in the media they love.
Discovering and latching on to pieces of art that touch you in profound, formative ways is a beautiful part of growing up in a world that’s so thoroughly saturated with mass media. In their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, writer / director Jane Schoenbrun turned that facet of childhood into an intimate coming-of-age horror about creating one’s identity on the internet.
But with their second feature, A24’s I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun cultivates that idea into an even more unsettling, moving narrative by framing obsessive fandom as both a blessing and a curse. Whereas We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a snapshot of life in the age of modern social media, I Saw the TV Glow is an exploration of what it felt like to be an outcast teenager in the ’90s — a time when young fans of sci-fi and fantasy often had to find each other by chance.
Though there are flashes of vibrant color in seventh grader Owen’s (Ian Foreman) memories from his younger years, his world has become a landscape of suburban beige and muted neons as I Saw the TV Glow introduces him in 1996 on the night of an election. With his school transformed into a polling place and filled with unfamiliar faces, it’s the last place he wants to be, especially with his mother, Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler), hovering over his shoulder. But as Owen wanders away to see what the halls of Void High look like at night when the dimmed lighting makes the building feel almost otherworldly, he unexpectedly comes across Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a moody ninth grader with her face buried in a book.
Despite them both being loners in search of social connections, at first, the two awkward teens don’t seem like they’ll get along or share many common interests. But when Owen catches a glimpse of what Maddy’s reading — an episode guide for a YA horror / fantasy series called The Pink Opaque — his curiosity about the TV show sparks her passion for talking about it, and the two begin an unlikely, complicated friendship.
With We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun created an unsettling and intense atmosphere of dread by situating its story largely in a single dark room and repeatedly cutting away to videos of people participating in the film’s mysterious, creepypasta-inspired web game. I Saw the TV Glow explores much more of the “real” world that a slightly older Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy exist in outside of their bedrooms and the basement, where they’re able to covertly watch The Pink Opaque together for the first time.
But as the teens begin opening up about their everyday struggles — his father (Fred Durst) is emotionally abusive, and she isn’t safe in her own home — I Saw the TV Glow also dips into The Pink Opaque’s monster-of-the-week reality in a way that illustrates things about Owen and Maddy that neither of them are fully able to articulate. Though I Saw the TV Glow leads with a lo-fi ’90s aesthetic evocative of coming-of-age dramas like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, it’s through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like beats of The Pink Opaque that the film comes into its own as a story about queer people finding themselves in the age of pre-internet genre fandoms.
To everyone else, The Pink Opaque is just a cheesy show about two girls who meet at summer camp, discover they share a powerful psychic connection, and then use their bond to routinely defeat the forces of evil after going back home to their families on opposite sides of the county. But to Owen and Maddy, the show’s heroines Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan) provide a much-needed escape from the monotony of their ordinary lives. The Pink Opaque resonates with the kids so profoundly that, with time, they start to question whether they might actually have a supernatural connection to it.
While there are initially distinct delineations between I Saw the TV Glow’s lo-fi reality and the phosphorescent world of The Pink Opaque, Schoenbrun blurs those boundaries to David Lynchian effect as the film follows Owen and Maddy through years of a secret friendship. As time pulls the two in different directions, the listlessness that dominates their lives takes on an unnerving, sinister quality. In fact, the two feel every bit as imperiled as Isabel and Tara do in the buildup to The Pink Opaque’s season five cliffhanger finale. And when Maddy’s house is engulfed in flames and she mysteriously disappears the same week The Pink Opaque is canceled, Owen can’t help but wonder whether there might be something to their suspicions about the show being much more than just a TV series.
In contrast to the film’s rich sonic palette that surges as musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl make appearances as themselves, I Saw the TV Glow’s leads deliver restrained performances that show rather than tell you who Owen and Maddy are. They’re fans of a show that, at least to Owen, seems to become simpler in tone and something that’s really meant for children as the years go by. But they are also two people grappling with an existential dysphoria that The Pink Opaque helps them better understand. Even though the show can’t fix their problems, it gives them a framework of queer identity to project themselves into and a language to express the deep-seated emotions that make them feel so different from other people.
The more the film shifts into its psychological fantasy thriller mode, the harder it becomes to tell how firm a grasp Owen and Maddy have on what is real and what isn’t. But rather than making either character’s story feel like a puzzle you’re meant to solve, each instance of The Pink Opaque bleeding into reality instead illustrates what it can feel like to long for something that you think only exists in fiction on TV.
Even with its handful of distracting, fourth wall-breaking exposition dumps, I Saw the TV Glow is a spellbinding watch as a standalone movie that’s trying to capture the essence of being one of the weirdos. What’s most promising about the film, though, is how clearly it speaks to the ways in which Schoenbrun’s larger vision for their “Screen Trilogy” — which began with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair — has grown. The evolution of a filmmaker’s voice is not always reason enough to be intrigued by the prospect of what they might create next. But Schoenbrun seems to have the heat, and I Saw the TV Glow is a strong sign of even greater things to come.
I Saw the TV Glow also stars Amber Benson, Emma Portner, Kristina Esfandiari, Connor O’Malley, and Danny Tamberelli. The movie debuts in select theaters on May 3rd, and will have a wider theatrical release on May 17th.
