Jane Schoenbrun crafts an astonishingly assured, and completely unique, examination of fandom and the trans experience in an unsettlingly powerful psychological horror. Here’s our I Saw The TV Glow review.
In 1996, a young Owen (later played by Justice Smith) finds himself drawn to a kid two years his senior. Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is awkward, cold and, on the surface, outright unfriendly. But she’s reading the episode guide for a show Owen’s only heard whispers about – a Buffy-esque monster-of-the-week series called The Pink Opaque which has captured his imagination the way only a show he’s forbidden from watching can.
Soon, Maddy is leaving taped episodes in Owen’s locker for him to catch up on. Linked by their love for the show and apparently little else, they develop a sort of awkward co-dependence that soon turns… Well, that would be telling.
It doesn’t take long before Owen’s real predicament comes to the fore. Lost in obsession and fandom for a show which, outside our two central characters, no one else seems to watch, The Pink Opaque and its A Trip To The Moon-inspired villain provide a fantastical anchor for a life which otherwise seems profoundly miserable. In an online age in which LGBTQ+ sub-cultures spring up around the unlikeliest of pop culture sources, TV Glow serves up an astute observation on the way we consume modern media as a profoundly horrifying metaphor for the closeted trans experience. It’s an empathy machine on acid.
Justice Smith’s sad eyes, awkward gait and high-pitched voice – raspy, as if he doesn’t get that much use out of it – give that empathy another focal point to latch onto. As we see Owen’s life unfold from seventh grade to grey-haired old age, the passage of time seems to wear him down just as much as the freakily traumatic events he may (or may not) be imagining along the way. After a series of charming comedy performances in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and The American Society Of Magical Negroes, here he offers something sadder, quieter, and above all, different.
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It would be easy to head into TV Glow expecting a quirky but familiar psychological horror. It’s hardly the first indie-horror to cast a neon-shot suburbia as a Lynchian nightmare. But Schoenbrun’s vision is anything but familiar. I Saw The TV Glow is one of those rare films that almost feels like it’s re-writing the cinematic rulebook as we’re watching it. It’s the kind of film that manages to thrill in the way it progresses the medium even as its content sparks existential dread.
With TV Glow, Schoenbrun offers a look at what it means to live as someone other than ourselves. If you want one example of the power of cinema in 2024, look no further. This is terrifyingly brilliant stuff.
I Saw The TV Glow is showing in UK cinemas now.
