Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our extensive coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and we’re reposting it today due to the film’s wider national release. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival, and check out our full archives of past editions.
There can no longer be any doubt that Jane Schoenbrun is one of the few mature and authorial voices in our current cinematic landscape who can make films about adolescence that feel genuinely truthful. Their last film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was one of the few movies able to accurately realize and reflect a pre-teen’s relationship with the allure of the Internet and its ability to expand one’s world as well as its ability to delude them, and it being released in the immediate post-pandemic period (in which all of those feelings were perhaps at their most acute) acted as a capstone to a moment in which life was often mostly digital. One might have wondered where they’d go from there – surely someone perhaps made an offer to them to make a movie about the Slenderman true-crime case – but Schoenbrun has defied expectation and made I Saw the TV Glow, both a massive expansion of their scope and talents and one of the landmark movies in the canon of “millennial contributions to cinema,” neither of which come at the expense of their ethos as a filmmaker.
Featuring two astonishing lead performances from Justice Smith and Bridgette Lundy-Paine, I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps the first standard-bearer of the post-Twin Peaks: The Return era to do something thematically interesting with some of the ideas that David Lynch helped to re-popularize: It is gnostic emo horror, dripping with sincerity and clarity, that stabs directly at the millennial relationship with media – a core aspect of the generation’s identity.
Millennials were perhaps the last generation that had an experience of the world prior to the Internet – for all of the understandable hand-wringing about the Internet Revolution and Its Consequences, it did offer an out to a certain kind of deeply isolated nerd. One could embrace a niche interest and suddenly find themselves no longer as alone as they were previously, surrounded by those willing to virtually accept them. No one is arguing that this isn’t the healthiest substitute for a physical community of friends, but it was at least an alternative to perpetual isolation. All you’d have is the CRT TV, your tapes, episode guides, and perhaps a convention to go to (if you could afford it). Or, if you were lucky enough, you’d have a friend. And that’s what Owen (Smith) once had. As an awkward seventh-grader, he met Maddy (Lundy-Paine), another outcast like him (although two grades up), while their parents were working the polls on election night ’96. He was wandering through empty rooms when he stumbled upon her, clad in all black, sitting on the floor reading an alluring and strange episode guide for a show called The Pink Opaque, about two girls who have a psychic bond across the country and spend their days battling monsters sent down by the show’s big bad. Owen’s never seen the show — it airs after his bedtime — but Maddy can tell he’s interested, and she invites him over to watch it with another one of her pals. He lies to his mom, tells her he’s hanging with another (former) friend, and sneaks across backyards to catch the latest episode. And he’s transfixed by what he sees.
The two form a strange friendship — Owen is pathologically shy and prone to being domineered by the stronger-voiced around him, and Maddy is a fiercely reactive person who wants nothing more than to be done with the town they grew up in — and it is almost entirely centered around The Pink Opaque. She leaves him tapes of the recently-released episodes in the darkroom at their school, and he sneaks over whenever he can to watch it with her, especially now that her friends have fully abandoned her after she came out of the closet (Owen, meanwhile, is basically asexual). Both of their home lives are starting to fall apart — his mom is sick, while Maddy’s family seems to be tearing itself apart — and their friendship comes to a dramatic end when Maddy disappears in the night, with only a burning CRT TV left behind. She wanted him to come with her, and he turned her down, forcing himself to live with the guilt that his friend might be alone or hurt in the wide expanses around them. Years pass — Owen’s mom dies, he gets a job at a movie theater, and he still lives at home, obsessing over the now-canceled Pink Opaque and enduring the derision of his father figure (Fred Durst) — and suddenly, Maddy reappears, bringing a revelation that is as practically implausible as it is emotionally plausible.
This is where Schoenbrun’s understanding of internet culture rears its head: They take a well-known modern phenomenon and place it at a time when it was not nearly as common, highlighting its inherent oddity and also its genuine allure to the lonely. We are awash in stories of real people who delude themselves into thinking that they inhabit a fictional world — indeed, it’s what Gnosticism is all about — but we have people, followed by thousands, who so desperately want to escape reality and inhabit the media that they love to the point that, at its most mild, they pay thousands of dollars to inhabit a Star Wars ship for a week, or at its worst, commit atrocities in the hope that they will be able to join their imaginary girlfriend in the Nickelodeon afterlife as a ghost.
Schoenbrun smartly straddles this line — the film never confirms its biases and leaves the viewer with a genuine sense of dread as to what’s real and what’s not, much like David Lynch did in The Return. But unlike Lynch’s work there, their cosmology is infinitely smaller, contained almost wholly within two people who may be more than who they think they are or who, tragically, may be exactly who they are and are deluding themselves into the possibility that their world may have more magic in it than possible. But it’s also Owen’s perception of these events that gives them their credence: Maddy says things to him that feel truer than he could ever imagine, as impossible as they sound, and his reflections seem to confirm it.
What Lynch does for dream logic, Schoenbrun does for memory: They have a gorgeous way of capturing how details change and erode as time flows onward, with the haze of uncertainty clouding what one would consider “the truth.” That self-doubt is the scariest thing about I Saw the TV Glow, as it immerses us in Owen’s insecurities — ones that just so happen to parallel those of many audience members, even if they were never obsessed with something to the degree that they might have assumed they were meant to live, say, inside of a UPN young adult drama. There are so many moments of truth here, with Schoenbrun articulating details in a way that makes emotional sense: imagine the disappointment you might have felt upon returning to a childhood favorite, be it a book or a movie or a TV show, and slowly watching that the things that may have, once upon a time, saved your life, were for their intended audience. This means that your bullies may have been right: You were, perhaps, that weird high schooler obsessed with a show for children. The residual shame and terror of that doubt is hard to shake, a form of ego death that undermines our relationships with media and, occasionally, the narratives of our lives. We are fragile creatures, and people like Owen are even more so: one shove and you’re shattered on the pavement.
But this is, at its core, gnosis, as one must smash the false barriers of an externally imposed reality through the means available to them. The Roman-era cults had devils imposing the veil upon humanity, keeping them away from Christ’s love, and Owen (and the characters of The Pink Opaque as a whole) has Mr. Melancholy, the man in the moon, who lords over perception and has, perhaps, imposed this ugly reality upon him. The villain is rendered initially as a visual reference to Melies’ Lune in A Trip to the Moon (perfectly befitting this Smashing Pumpkins-soaked setting of mid-’90s malaise, and yes, there is a “Tonight Tonight” needle-drop at one point, although I believe it’s a cover used here), but he transforms midway through the film into something far scarier, with Schoenbrun using the A24 money to purchase some genuinely horrifying digital effects. It’s one of many astonishing VFX moments in the film, and most of them are practically realized – the Ice Cream Man, one of the monsters-of-the-week resembling a human blood-thirsty Icedream Cone, feels as if it were ripped from an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, while others pull from similar media like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even fucking Big Bad Beetleborgs (and this is where I pull out my “Only ‘90s kids will get this” card).
This all feels so real, even when it drifts into CGI, especially for those who lived through this era of media. It’s as if the clips from The Pink Opaque were pulled directly from some long-forgotten storage room at Nickelodeon Studios: It depicts the era as it was, not merely how it felt. It never crosses over into that traditional auto-fellatio that many filmmakers engage in for style points with the crowd, and with good reason. We idealize aspects of our childhoods to preserve their value, more often than not, doing so by placing a heavy emphasis on their material expressions or the escapist media we once consumed, and this creeps into how we portray these eras in on-screen fiction. Normally, everyone is dressed well in recognizable brands, sporting an easily identifiable haircut, and talking about some familiar cultural experience. Look, for instance, at the gulf between 1994 as represented in the most recent Transformers film and Schoenbrun’s 1996: One is built for superficial recognition, and the other reaches into your chest, pulls out your heart, and forces you to examine it in all of its hideous splendor. You wore clothes from Wal-Mart. Your stepdad wouldn’t let you get that cool haircut. You never watched Deep Space 9 as it aired, and you only caught up with your more mature (yet still deeply nerdy) pals when the episode guide hit the library that next year. Or perhaps you did or had all of those things but never felt as comfortable as you should have been, hence the obscuring of insecurity.
I Saw the TV Glow relishes in the uncomfortable fact that the good times never truly were that good, yet deeply understands that these amber-preserved moments are still stuffed with a deep and yearning meaning. It is one of the essential new additions to the canon of Millennial Art, capturing those last few moments in adolescence before the internet began to consume everything slowly and forever alter our relationships with each other and ourselves. I was worried that Schoenbrun would stay in the online-adjacent world after World’s Fair and make relevant movies about relevant topics for relevant short-lived moments, but they have instead made great strides towards capturing the eternally ephemeral: That brief moment in young-adult lives in which we make our first connections with others and media.
I’d suggest that most people have a Pink Opaque: Some work of art, cheap or not, that summons up entire emotional landscapes full of long-vanished friends, haunted rooms, and feelings nearly as real as the day one first had them. I Saw the TV Glow is a deeply felt depiction of that world, presented to us in its terrifying beauty.