Review of “I Saw the TV Glow” – a 90s Telly-Addict Chiller destined for fame

Cinephiles often worry that talented young filmmakers are abandoning cinema for TV. Jane Schoenbrun, one of the most talented filmmakers today, has crafted a superb feature film about a fictional TV show, imagined with such loving and unnerving intensity that it could easily become a real series. With a compelling cod-90s score by Schoenbrun’s musical collaborator Alexander Giannascoli, or Alex G, I Saw the TV Glow remains unforgettable. It deserves cult classic status without the “cult”; it is deeply scary, deeply strange, and deeply sad — a serious new take on Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge for the 2020s.

Schoenbrun made a strong impression with a startling 2021 debut that exploited the lockdown-Zoom aesthetic with an unmatched ingenuity. Her no-budget chiller We’re All Going to the World’s Fair focused on a young woman drawn into the world of online gaming and collaboratively authored creepy online horror. There were no in-person dialogue scenes; everyone existed in an atomized universe. Now, we are in the pre-internet 1990s, at a high school where parents are voting for a second Clinton term.

Owen, portrayed by Ian Foreman as a child and as an adult by Justice Smith (from Benjamin Caron’s thriller Sharper), is deeply unhappy, uncertain about his relationship with his mother, his sexuality, and everything else. He meets the older, supercool, emo-ish Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, channeling a very young Winona Ryder), equally unhappy and abused by her stepdad. She is queer (a term rarely used in 1996), and when asked about his own preferences, Owen shyly responds that he “likes TV shows.”

Maddy introduces him to a show called The Pink Opaque and lends him her recorded VHS copies of all the episodes. It’s a story of two girls, Isabel and Tara (pronounced “terror”), who have an intense relationship that transcends anything as banal as romance. They battle supernatural foes weekly under the direction of the villainous Mr. Melancholy, who lives in the sky like Georges Méliès’s man in the moon.

Owen and Maddy become passionately addicted to both the show and, in a platonic way, to each other. They don’t obsess over the actors or directors—this is before the internet made discovering such things easy. They obsess about the show itself. The Pink Opaque becomes their world, more real and important than anything in their boring town and lives. They yearn for reinvention, for escape, and the show is their key. But then Maddy mysteriously disappears, is declared dead, and reappears after a decade. During her absence, Owen grows older and more depressed, brooding on an adult truth: years go by quicker than skipped DVD chapters. Where has Maddy been?

Audiences familiar with 90s TV might recognize the dynamic between Owen and Maddy as akin to Rickie Vasquez and Rayanne Graff in the classic My So-Called Life. The mix of genuine fear, rapture, and nostalgic longing for a compromised teen past echoes the works of 90s masters like Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland. It’s a nostalgia not for the past, but for an alternative imagined present. And reminiscent of another 90s classic, perhaps Maddy has seen through the Wachowskian Matrix—or perhaps she hasn’t.

The power of Schoenbrun’s film lies in its matter-of-fact delivery. Maddy’s ecstasy contrasts with Owen’s fear, and his life unfolds in dreary sadness. Living in his deceased parents’ house, working terrible jobs, ditching the old TV for a new plasma model, and professing love for his new “family”—the people he watches on his flatscreen. I Saw the TV Glow is claustrophobic, unwholesome, and brilliant.

I Saw the TV Glow will be in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 July and Australian cinemas from 29 August.