I Saw the TV Glow Review: A unique piece of filmmaking
by Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Having a TV obsession as a teenager almost feels like a rite of passage. For me, that show was The X-Files. I got hooked in the eighth grade toward the end of the first season and caught up on the show during re-runs in the summer and was hooked. I loved the alien conspiracy and mythology of the show, but also the monster of the week aspect too as Agents Mulder and Scully investigated cases of paranormal phenomena. It is through the prism of The X-Files that I relate to Jane Schoenbrun’s film, I Saw the TV Glow.
This is not the way everyone will relate to this film, though, as it is overtly an allegory of the transgender experience. It is set, at least initially, in the mid-90s, with two awkward teens, Owen (Justice Smith, with a younger Owen portrayed by Ian Foreman) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who develop a tentative friendship through their shared interest in a low-budget TV show, The Pink Opaque, a sci-fi show about two teenage girls who meet at summer camp, have a psychic connection, and fight against the evil big bad of the show, Mr. Melancholy. Owen is too young to stay up and watch The Pink Opaque and lies to his parents about spending the night at a friend’s house to sneak over to the older Maddy’s house to finally watch an episode of the show.
From that moment on, his obsession with the show grows, with Maddy leaving him VHS recordings of the show at school for him to watch on his own time. After a few years, though, Maddy disappears, and the show is canceled. Several years later, Maddy suddenly reappears in Owen’s life, claiming to have been gone in the Pink Opaque the entire time. Maddy’s revelation begins to distort Owen’s reality.
Schoenbrun’s previous film, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, dealt with online obsessions and viral videos and the blurring of the real world with the online world. Dipping back in time to the 90s and making a movie that touches on the obsessive fandoms of cult sci-fi shows like The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a perfect progression.
Owen and Maddy are two high school loners who have difficulty relating to others and each other. They find a mutual connection through their shared love of The Pink Opaque. People have bonded and continue to bond with each other over a shared love of something in pop culture, mainstream or otherwise, and their connection to the TV show feels authentic to a real lived experience with a 90s TV show that the director likely had.
Maddy’s return sparks the real psychological horror of the film and the existential angst that Owen feels, like he doesn’t feel at home in his own skin and doesn’t trust his surroundings. To borrow from the Wachowski’s The Matrix, itself a film with retroactive trans subtext, Maddy is the Morpheus to Owen’s Neo in the suburbs, though Owen and Neo make very different decisions, and it is perhaps a glimpse of what happens if you’re too afraid to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole really is.
Smith and Lundy-Paine give very good performances, portraying these characters at a few different ages, though the aging effects on Smith can only do so much when they try to portray him as middle-aged. Lundy-Paine has a quiet, unnerving assurance that she’s discovered the truth of the world. Smith’s performance is subdued, as if he were a tourist in his own life, just observing and not interacting. There is a great moment when Owen is talking to Maddy after she has returned, and he starts remembering moments that were deeply troubling that were not previously shown during his high school years, including a freak out that really hammers home the psychological horror of this movie.
A lot of critics lavished praise on the 2021 film We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. While it wasn’t quite my tempo, it was inventive and showed some promise. I Saw the TV Glow is undoubtedly a significant step forward for Schoenbrun, though I think the film stumbles at the very end in not really knowing how to end the film, even as it offers a provocative outcome. I’m really not a fan of the non-ending ending where films just end abruptly. Generally speaking, they feel like a cheap art house cop-out, a bad caricature of the Sundance model, or virtue signaling that your movie doesn’t have an “American ending” where everything is tied up in a bow.
Despite that, I Saw the TV Glow is worth seeking out for people who feel marginalized, like the trans community, fans of psychological horror films, people who want to reminisce about their TV obsessions back in the day, or people who like movies with a surreal bent in the vein of David Lynch and with a little bit of body horror like David Cronenberg thrown in for good measure. I Saw the TV Glow is a unique piece of filmmaking, and the buzz it has created is mostly warranted.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars