Two outcast teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over their love of The Pink Opaque, a campy, supernatural TV show that plays late at night on the young adult channel and hits at deeper themes despite its production budget.  When the show is canceled after the Season 5 cliffhanger finale, Maddy disappears from the small town. The only thing left of her is the smoldering television set she abandoned in her backyard.  Owen stays behind to see his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) pass away from cancer, his father (Fred Durst) become even more distant, and, at one of the lowest parts of his own depression, Maddy reappears. 

Jane Schoenbrun writes and directs I Saw the TV Glow, a 100-minute work of calculated suspense that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of its theatrical release mounted by A24.  There is a lot to take in here, from the period setting which runs parallel to the production design of the fictional TV show; art design for the film was led by Naomi Munro and production design by Brandon Tonner-Connoly.  Everything is so intricate that it is undeniably a peak into Schoenbrun’s imagination.  Sofi Marshall assembles the film and gives both stories their own unique feel so as the worlds begin to meld, we begin to question what is real and what is imagined, but the film throws us a life ring in Alex G’s incredibly evocative yet playful score. 

While the film needs to be commended for being able to translate Schoenbrun’s bold idea from their head to the screen, that is about where the praise ends.  Schoenbrun turns out to be their own worst enemy as they fumble this concept that could and should be so much better than it is because it relies on an audience that has a tolerance for toxic fan culture.  What makes it worse is that, through the turns of the plot and the themes that the film is contending with, the story becomes almost dangerous and irresponsible in how it portrays depression, mental illness, expression of identity, and self-harm.  These are not easy things to talk about by any means, and Schoenbrun is not actively working to undermine the importance of these themes, but their teetering into the realm of body horror seems more sensationalist even if the metaphor tracks when seen from a distance.  The scene comes late in the film and it leaves us with an icky feeling that washes over us because Schoenbrun does not give the characters enough in the preceding acts that we have a real connection to them. 

Simply put, they do not give these characters support on the page so the cast struggles to bring them to life and we end up spending our time with a pair of two insufferable people who we feel guilty about for thinking of them in that way because we know that they are enabling each other’s worst self-destructive behavior.  These are two characters who have never had an original thought in their entire lives and cling to their pop culture as a way of feeling good – and in Maddy’s case superior – about themselves in relation to others. Later in the film, when the rose-colored glasses are removed, Owen begins to free fall into crisis when he realizes that what he defined himself by in childhood may not have been all that good, but the film does not interrogate those themes of fractured nostalgia very deeply. This film should highlight the importance of letting kids find their voice and express themselves in a supportive environment, and it feels like that is what it wants to do by showing what happens in a stifled and oppressive household, but it does not land because these characters are more ideas than actually realized people on the page.

Schoenbrun asks their actors to navigate a script that is akin to reading someone’s diary written in code, but only with half of the cipher needed to unlock it.  We get the broad strokes ideas and major points of the story and from there we can infer why these things are important to the author, but we do not have enough to get any real introspection which is the key to understanding the deeper message of the film.  The metaphors here all work, but in a juvenile sense of depth and it results in a surprising misstep from Smith who has proven himself capable of working across many genres but just cannot seem to get a handle on Owen.  To be charitable to the script, Owen, who tears down the fourth wall to begin narrating the film in the second act, is in a bit of arrested development so this quality of feeling like it is flipping through a fourteen-year-old’s diary may have been on purpose, but if that is the case the production design far outdoes the writing to the point where the script just becomes embarrassing; intentional or not. 

It is always difficult to critique coming-of-age stories that are so overtly personal as this one is because commentary can sometimes feel like a discrediting of the artist’s experience instead of an active discussion about what is committed to the screen. It would be disingenuous to say that Schoenbrun is wielding this feeling as a shield to put these images and sequences on screen, but what we do see is unavoidably upsetting, not in a depraved way as horror is oft to do, but it is upsetting in a rather dangerous and predatory way. There are two films that come to mind as not-so-distant cousins to I Saw the TV Glow; Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004). Both of these films deal with similar themes and have similar structures, but the major difference is that they are bolstered by a stronger script that allows the cast to excel in their roles so when Kelly and Araki show some of the darker elements of the human condition, it does not feel as exploitative like when Schoenbrun tries to do the same. 

I Saw the TV Glow has a lot on its mind. It is a coming-of-age film charting a queer awakening while peddling in horror and suspense tropes but seldom delivering on them despite that imagery occupying so much of the runtime. That the drama then is hardly explored at all makes for a wholly unsatisfying experience. Around the halfway point, Schoenbrun begins to find their footing as we follow Owen desperately trying to define himself while at the same time fitting into the mold set out for him by his parents, both of whom seem united in their desire to squash out his creativity. What is troubling, though, is how the film presents its more queer identity specifically in brief scenes and flashes of memory that show Owen in a pink dress, pretending along with Maddy to be one-half of The Pink Opaque in a game of make-believe. We do not see enough of Owen engaging with this show to truly believe he is that engrossed with it, and knowing that Maddy is established as queer in the text of the film, these scenes play out as if she had coerced him into the costume to fit her fantasy. Given her age, albeit only two years, and her access to the show, it definitely feels like the glorification of the abuse of power as the film tries to unpack its themes of identity and one is reminded of The Blue Whale Challenge while further propagating the myth that queer people are predators. These are all unintentional connotations delivered by the film, but nonetheless, they are delivered and had Schoenbrun shown a little more care in crafting Maddy as a mentor, even if she was not a great one, then the script would at least feel less dangerous in its implications. 

The film is a very misguided effort and with the simple reworking of perspective, it could have achieved so much more of what it was trying to do. Schoenbrun is not working with the acuity to make this metatextual story work, so instead they should have focused their effort on delivering us The Pink Opaque as Owen members it and Maddy experienced it. The show is a stand-in for Buffy the Vampire Slayer made on the shoestring budget of early-era Dr. Who and with the emotional resonance of something like Supernatural. Focusing their efforts on telling that story – Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner) and his pursuit of Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan) – would have allowed them to weave in the various themes they are trying to tackle in “the real world” while also being able to lean in and embrace the influence of David Lynch and David Cronenberg in a way that does not feel cheap. This route would have created a film that would stand a chance at being a cult classic, one that would get pulled down from its hiding spot for sleepovers to come, and the snow globe reveal could have gone down as one of the twists of the decade. Instead, they deliver a film that feels like a corporation cashing in on a TikTok trend in that it is cloying and inorganic. 

Schoenbrun is clearly a director with a vision, and a lesser director would have almost certainly cast themselves in the role of Maddy in addition to writing and directing, but they show enough fortitude here to avoid that choice. They still need more people on their crew to help bring the vision into focus as there is way too much interstitial material left behind in their head that did not quite make it to the page, and through the filmmaking process, there is always a minor sum of details that then do not make the leap from page to screen. If, somehow, the film is a direct and absolute translation from inception to delivery, then Schoenbrun took a bold, but ultimately fruitless, swing. The enjoyment that can be gleaned from I Saw the TV Glow lies wholly on behalf of the craft partners because the story is so emotionally esoteric that it becomes alienating. To be generous, the film was almost certainly conceived as a cautionary tale, but it got lost along the way and instead tried to become an ode to alternative culture, but the result is Schoenbrun desperately trying to tell us how cool they were because they knew of this indie band before they were big or followed this actor since his reoccurring role on some schlocky late night, low budget serial, though they would never stop to calling themselves a hipster despite being exactly that. The themes are still there, though, so what really happens is that we are held hostage by Schoenbrun as they treat filmmaking as their therapy – a luxury they deny their characters who all desperately need it – and while they are far from the first and far from the last filmmaker to channel their anxieties to celluloid – or in this day and age, ssd card – it is not an enjoyable experience for us as the audience. This is a story better left for the pages of Schoenbrun’s own middle school diary and not in their Final Draft file directory.