"I Saw The TV Glow" review: An eerie exploration of identity

“I Saw the TV Glow,” 2024, directed by Jane Schoenbrun

★★★★★

It’s hard to overstate what an exciting moment in time it is to witness the true beginning of Jane Schoenbrun’s career. Their debut feature, "We’re All Going to the World’s Fair", is fascinating as a unique piece of internet-infused horror filmmaking that begged to be peeled back and examined. "World’s Fair", though, was limited by its minimal budget and its vague subject matter in a way that made it more inscrutably personal despite its emotional evocations. While "I Saw the TV Glow" still captures Schoenbrun’s unique brand of eerie unreality, it expands on "World’s Fair"’s ideas exponentially and presents them in ways filmgoers have never seen on this scale.

There are traces of a lot of other filmmakers here—Schoenbrun has been open about their inspiration from David Lynch, which shows, and audiences will likely find themselves drawing a number of comparisons to David Cronenberg’s "Videodrome"—but the formal polish on display here, as well as the decidedly transgender narrative that the nightmarish aesthetics are combined with, make Schoenbrun a certified trailblazer. 

General audiences will struggle with its abstruseness; "TV Glow" never quite divulges its full intentions and has an abruptly ambiguous ending that leaves the audience with far more questions than answers. What it does do, though, is conjure deep-seated, oddly nostalgic feelings of self-discovery and childhood memory. Schoenbrun and director of photography Eric Yue bathe the entire film in neon greens, pinks, and purples, making Owen’s (Justice Smith) “reality” increasingly indistinguishable from the world of his favorite TV show (the "Goosebumps" or "Are You Afraid of the Dark"-esque construction that is "The Pink Opaque"). Smith himself gives easily the best performance of his young career, carrying his character through an entire life of existential crises and repressed trauma.

It’s a film that’s hard to criticize at all because it’s so confronting and dreamlike—when things feel uncanny we’re left wondering if that was Schoenbrun’s intention, or even if we imagined it entirely. As the "TV Glow"’s world became increasingly warped, we question our own reality, not just the film’s. 

"I Saw the TV Glow" is a wholly engrossing sophomore outing that not only has an astringent, revelatory story to tell, but also is a defining moment for an incoming generation of filmmakers. If you allow yourself to become Owen for 100 minutes, you’ll never forget it.

"I Saw the TV Glow" releases in theaters on May 3

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