Gunge, goons, and girls with unbreakable psychic bonds are your new late-night obsession in this unsettling fable about what happens when you get offered a chance at a fantasy, but choose to settle for reality.
I Saw the TV Glow is about the places we escape to when we don’t feel at home in the real world and the brutal truth that even fantasy has its limits.
Screened as part of 2024
I Saw the TV Glow 2024
It’s 1998. Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) are two awkward, lonely teenagers, stuck somewhere in smalltown America. In a time before the internet, their escape is the alluring weirdness of late-night television. One show in particular draws them together – The Pink Opaque. Think Buffy meets Power Rangers. But after Maddy mysteriously disappears, the line between TV and reality starts to blur, leaving Owen alone to navigate a grotesque nightmare world of memory, monsters, and regret.
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an intimate, slow-burning horror about loneliness and isolation online. With a bigger budget and a more confident hand, I Saw the TV Glow is a revelatory expansion on that debut, using alienation and media obsession as the springboard to tell a heartbreaking parable about self-denial, and – in carefully surfaced subtext – about transness and the suffocating horror of the closet.
With a soundtrack by indie darling Alex G (and contributions from the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek), stunning use of colour and light, and some truly astonishing 1990s-style prosthetic make-up, I Saw the TV Glow is the rare surreal freak-out with real heart and real pain. — Amelia Berry
“If We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a 360p snapshot of dysphoria in motion, I Saw the TV Glow is an intimate landscape shot with the ultra-vivid resolution of a recurring dream; it marries the queer radicality of a Gregg Araki film with the lush intoxication of a Gregory Crewdson photo, and finds Schoenbrun holding on to every inch of their vision as they make the leap from outsider artist to A24-stamped auteur. This is a movie that knows it will be seen (or was at least financed with that expectation), and yet, to an even greater degree than Schoenbrun’s debut, it’s also a movie about how the things people watch can have the power to see them in return. Even the parts of themselves they might be hiding from. Even the parts of themselves they aren’t ready to name yet.” — David Ehrlich, Indiewire