‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Sundance 2024 Review: A Masterpiece
Chad Collins
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I was a huge fan of director Jane Schoenbrun’s lo-fi, melancholic odyssey We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. There, Schoenbrun successfully culled niche creepypasta obsession and applied it to a singular yet remarkably expressive, dare I say universal, portrait of adolescent loneliness and the chasms into which those most susceptible might fall. Their latest feature, I Saw the TV Glow, is no less singular, a groundbreaking odyssey of trans-identity and queerness whose horror-adjacent trappings consistently elevate it to classic status.
Schoenbrun, after the screening, remarked during a Q&A on the almost psychic connection many youth (while unspoken, most decidedly queer youth) have to the media that shapes them. It’s in these digital landscapes, whether those be backroom archives or episodic tween programming, that the untethered find identity where they can, often a true identity, one regularly unmoored, as Schoenbrun noted, by hegemonic power structures.
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Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (a phenomenal Brigette Lundy-Paine) develop a detached yet deeply meaningful relationship over a mutual interest in the young adult program The Pink Opaque. Think of it as a kind of late-1990s Buffy riff, one crafted not from mere pastiche, but earnest literacy in what made shows of that ilk work. It’s no wonder that Buffy’s own Amber Benson appears in a brief, deeply affecting role midway through the movie.
That tether to both media and the other guides Owen and Maddy through several key stages of their adolescent upbringings, grappling with gender identity, terminal illness, grief, and dysfunctional domesticity in the suburbs. There’s a liminality to Schoenbrun’s depiction of the late nineties, grunge ennui, and honesty that emerges from the highly stylized periphery. It feels simultaneously familiar and foreign, an evocative interrogation of both Owen and Maddy’s interiority and the ways in which they see the world. Think of it as ontology as horror filmmaking.
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The Pink Opaque’s Mr. Melancholy is the faux series’ big bad, hovering just out of frame long enough for his brief appearances to land with a wallop of heartrending, suffocating dread. Lundy-Paine remarked that Mr. Melancholy is an irregular force, one akin to a kind of anti-moon that disorients rather than calibrates. Mr. Melancholy is a dad asking, “Isn’t that show for girls?” after their son asks to stay up late to watch the latest episode. He is bosses, structures, and cultures that consign the most vulnerable to bury who they are so deep inside, they mature into a kind of hollow shell, unable to recall what authentic part of themselves was there in the first place.
Which, of course, makes I Saw the TV Glow a decidedly trans movie. It would be a disservice to assess it on anything other than those terms. While my lived experience is markedly different than the thrust of the narrative here, I am confident in saying it’s a profound accomplishment of not just trans-storytelling, but storytelling more broadly. It’s an arresting fever dream of angst and terror that throttles the audience with affecting truths, augmented by sensational music (Alex G, a legend) and arresting, analog visuals courtesy of Eric K. Yue.
There’s even an entire soundtrack commissioned for the film, featuring vocals from the likes of Phoebe Bridgers. In any other movie, that would be the calling card. For I Saw the TV Glow, it’s just stardust as the movie soars over the moon.
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I Saw the TV Glow
Summary
I Saw the TV Glow is a masterclass in queer storytelling whose genre ethos elevate it to new heights.
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