Review: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements and teen smoking

Score: 4 out of 5

I Saw the TV Glow is a movie that's probably gonna stick with me for a while. Even as somebody who didn't necessarily have the queer lens that writer/director Jane Schoenbrun brought to the film, it still hit me like a sack of bricks, a fusion of nostalgia for the kids' and teen horror shows of the '90s, a deconstruction of that nostalgia and of our relationship with the media we love, a coming-of-age tale about not fitting in and living in a miserable world, and modern creepypasta and analog horror influences, all building to an ending where the anticlimactic note it wrapped up on wound up serving as a very grim and appropriate coda suggesting that nothing good will happen after. It's a film where I was able to put together the pieces of the story and figure out where it was headed after a certain point, but the journey was a lot more important than the destination here, serving up a moody, weird tale that felt like something pulled out of both my childhood and my adulthood in equal measure. If you're expecting a simple horror tale with big frights and easy answers, this will probably leave you scratching your head at the end, but if you want a movie with a smart and wrenching plot, compelling characters, and a hell of a sense of style that's quietly chilling without really being in-your-face scary, this is one you probably won't soon forget.

The film starts out in the late '90s in an anonymous middle-class suburb that, while it was never explicitly stated where it's supposed to be, I figured out was New Jersey right away even before the credits rolled and I saw that, sure enough, this was filmed in Verona and Cedar Grove, such was the familiarity of the scenery from my own childhood. Our protagonists Owen and Maddy are a pair of awkward teenagers who slowly bond over their shared fandom of The Pink Opaque, a kids' horror series that airs on the Young Adult Network (a fairly obvious pastiche of Nickelodeon) and is inspired by shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The protagonists of The Pink Opaque, Isabel and Tara, are a pair of teenage girls who developed a psychic connection at summer camp that they use to fight various monsters, as well as an overarching villain named Mr. Melancholy. For Maddy, the show is an escape from her abusive home life, while for Owen, it's a guilty pleasure that he has to watch by way of Maddy taping it every Saturday night at 10:30 and giving him the tape the following week, as not only does it air past his bedtime but his father looks askance at it for being a "girly" show. Things start to get weird once the show is canceled on a cliffhanger at the end of its fifth season -- and shortly after, Maddy mysteriously disappears, leaving only a burning TV set in her backyard.

I can't say anything more about the plot without spoilers other than the broadest strokes. On the surface, a lot of the story that transpires here, that of a creepy kids' show that may be more than it seems, is reminiscent of Candle Cove, only drawing less of its inspiration from '70s local television than from '90s Nickelodeon, Fox Kids, and The WB. But while Candle Cove was a brisk, one-off campfire tale that you can probably read in five to ten minutes (which you should, by the way), this is something with a lot more on its mind. It's a film about a life wasted, one where the real horror is psychological and emotional as Owen realizes that he's trapped in a life he shouldn't be trapped in, and it would not have worked without Justice Smith's performance as the film's central dramatic anchor. From everything I've seen him in, Smith is a guy who specializes in playing awkward nerds like Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera, and here, he takes that in a distinctly Lynchian direction as somebody who can't shake the feeling that he's living a lie but is either unable or unwilling to say precisely what it is. After the first act, this becomes a film about a man who's spinning his wheels in life, and not even checking off the boxes expected of a man like him to be considered "successful" seems to solve it. He narrates the film at various points, and as it goes on, it becomes hard not to wonder if even he believes what he's saying. Watching him, I saw traces of myself living in Florida until last year, spinning my own wheels in either school, menial jobs, or just sitting at home doing nothing. He's somebody whose arc struck close to home, and I imagine that, even if one discounts the fairly overt "closeted trans person" metaphors his character is wrapped in, a lot of viewers will probably get bigger chills seeing themselves in him than they will from the sight of Mr. Melancholy. Brigette Lundy-Paine, meanwhile, plays Maddie as either the one person who understands what's going on or somebody who's let her devotion to an old TV show completely consume her and drive her to madness, and while I won't say what direction the film leans in, I will say that it was still a highly compelling performance that forced me to question everything I witnessed on screen.

And beyond just the events of the story, the biggest thing the film had me questioning was nostalgia. In many ways, this is a movie about our relationship with the past, especially the things we loved as children. It can be ridiculous the attachment we have to childhood ephemera, holding up old shows, books, movies, and games as masterpieces of storytelling only to go back to them years later and realize that they do not hold up outside of our memories of better times. It fully gets the appeal of wanting to pretend otherwise, but it is also honest about the fact that a lot of stuff we adored as kids was pretty bad. There are several scenes in this movie that show us scenes from The Pink Opaque, and Schoenbrun faithfully recreated the low-budget, 4:3 standard-definition TV look of many of those shows -- warts and all, as Owen realizes later in the film when we see one of the cheesiest things I've ever seen passed off as children's entertainment. There are many ways to read the story here and how it plays out, but one thing at its core that is unmistakable is that nostalgia is a liar.

It doesn't hurt, either, that this is a beautiful film to watch. It may be about how the main reason we're nostalgic for the past is because they were simpler times when we had lower standards, but Schoenbrun still makes the late '90s and '00s look magical, even if it comes paired with a sort of bleakness in the atmosphere that never lets up. The constant feeling of overcast moodiness is not only visually gripping, it serves the film's themes remarkably well, creating the feeling that, even during the protagonists' wondrous childhoods, there's something lurking just out of frame that isn't right and is going to make their lives miserable. The monster design, much of it first seen on The Pink Opaque, was an odd mix of cheesy and genuinely creepy that not only served as a loving homage to the '90s kids'/teen horror shows that this movie was referencing, but still managed to work in the story, especially once shit gets real and those dumb-looking monsters suddenly become the scariest damn things your 12-year-old self ever watched. There aren't a lot of big jump scares here; rather, this is a movie powered by themes and performances, with Maddy's third-act speech in particular suddenly having me take another look at shows like Buffy and Angel that I grew up with in a completely different light. (Damn it, why did Lost have to be so mind-screwy and reality-fiddling that I could suddenly draw all manner of disquieting conclusions about it?)

The Bottom Line

I Saw the TV Glow isn't for everyone, but it's still a highly potent tale of nostalgia and growing up that wears its affection for its inspirations on its sleeve and has a very solid, engaging, and chilling core to it. Whether you're a child of the '90s and '00s, non-heteronormative, or simply in the mood for an offbeat teen horror movie, this is one to check out, and one I'll probably be thinking about for a long time.