Using vintage horror movie tropes and young-adult TV shows as a lens to explore themes of queer sexuality, family trauma and adolescent angst, I Saw the TV Glow is an ambitious hot mess of a movie, bursting with stylistic verve and raw emotion. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature after the charmingly odd low-budget psycho-thriller We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) is backed by some prestige industry names, including Emma Stone’s production company Fruit Tree and respected genre-friendly art-house distributor A24. Six months after its splashy Sundance debut, this flawed but impressively weird passion project is still enjoying a healthy festival run, screening this week at Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta.
I Saw the TV Glow charts an intense platonic friendship between two high-school misfits in the mid 1990s. Shy Owen (initially played by Ian Foreman, then Justice Walker) bonds with punky outsider Maddy (a highly compelling Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their shared obsession with The Pink Opaque, a supernatural TV series obviously modelled on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Because the show screens too late for Owen’s strictly enforced bedtime, Maddy begins cautiously inviting him to her home for Saturday night sleepovers.
The immersively eerie milieu of The Pink Opaque, which concerns two psychic teenage girls battling a grotesque monster called Mister Melancholy, feels much more real to these love-starved superfans than their miserable home lives. Both come from abusive or uncaring families, and both harbour queer feelings, though Owen is more confused about his sexual identity. But their friendship eventually reaches breaking point, with Owen declining Maddy’s invitation to run away together. When Maddy finally resurfaces eight years later, she brings shock news: the creepy dark-mirror netherworld of The Pink Opaque is real, and she wants to take Owen there.
I Saw the TV Glow is clearly a personal passion project for Schoenbrun, who is trans, and uses they/their pronouns. The director began work on the screenplay during their own gender transition, and the storyline functions like a defiant, empathetic pro-trans allegory, with the braver Maddy breaking free from her stifling old identity while the shy Owen keeps his secret self bottled up inside, with painful consequences.
Though it picked up mostly positive reviews at its Sundance and Berlin premieres, I Saw the TV Glow also proved polarising, with not much bandwidth between rapturous raves and lukewarm dismissals. For older viewers who find Generation Z’s obsession with their own gender-fluid identity a little tiresome, this queer fairy tale might feel like an indulgent wallow in self-absorbed narcissism. Walker’s sulky performance is a key weakness here, his whimpering monotone and puppyish eyes more grating than endearing. The fact that he looks almost nothing like Foreman’s younger incarnation of Owen only amplifies this irritant factor.
But more charitable viewers will applaud the film’s bold tonal shifts, richly allusive layers and nostalgic pop-culture myth-making. Besides the Buffy homages, including a small role for former vampire-slaying queer icon Amber Benson, there are clear nods to David Lynch here, plus an explicit steal from David Cronenberg’s queasy body-horror classic Videodrome (1983). By deftly deploying retro-horror tropes to interrogate deeper themes of sexuality and alienation, Schoenbrun also has a kinship with other smart indie directors like Peter Strickland and Jennifer Reeder. But in terms of its overall texture, I Saw the TV Glow arguably owes more Richard Kelly’s cult coming-of-age classic Donnie Darko (2001), which inhabited a similar liminal space between dream and reality, feverish hallucination and teen-angst confessional.
Even when its narrative and performance elements fall short, I Saw the TV Glow remains visually voluptuous, saturating the senses with a vivid nocturama of neon colours, mysterious late-night landscapes and strikingly surreal vignettes. It is also drenched in music, mostly self-consciously retro indie-rock. Winking musical in-jokes are scattered across the film, with Fred Durst of chest-thumping rap-metal band Limp Bizkit a great casting choice as Owen’s bullying father. Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has a co-producer credit, appearing both on the soundtrack and in a cameo role. The Pink Opaque itself borrows its title from a 1986 compilation album by revered Scottish dream-pop band The Cocteau Twins, which makes sense, as Schoenbrun’s film conjurs up a similar emotional hinterland of blissed-out psychodrama and nerve-jangling intoxication.
Director, screenwriter: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Lindsey Jordan, Helena Howard, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler, Conner O’Malley, Emma Porter
Cinematography: Eric Yue
Editing: Sofi Marshall
Music: Alex G.
Producers: Emma Stone, Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Sam Intili, Sarah Winshall, Phoebe Bridgers
Production companies: Fruit Tree (US), Smudge Films (US), Hypnic Jerk (US)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
100 minutes