I SAW THE TV GLOW - Mark Reviews Movies

I Saw the TV Glow, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 2, 2024

Everything seems more vibrant, alive, and, in some ways, real when we're young, because things are still new—to be discovered and be curious about and serve as the source of some wonder. I Saw the TV Glow presents itself as a mystery about a missing teenager and a puzzle about what its blending of fiction and the real world says about its main character. At the film's heart, though, this is a story about lonely people latching on to the things that do seem full of wonder when they're young, chasing that feeling as the years pass, and maybe missing the chance to achieve some sort of happiness, meaning, or sense of self along the way.

Writer/director Jane Schoebrun's film creates that insulated world of suburban life in the 1990s and early 2000s, that period of fandom when encyclopedias of specific knowledge weren't digital but existed in the pages of guides and in face-to-face discussions, and an unsettling atmosphere that such a way life and a way of perceiving the world are all that there is. This place is a prison for Owen (a great Justice Smith, revealing layers of vulnerability and anguish), a sheltered kid who becomes a socially awkward teenager and more—or less—by the end of the tale. While he knows that's the case, what could he actually do about it?

The mood here is one of uncertain dread, much like the feeling Owen gets when he watches ads for, hears about the details of, and, finally, watches episodes of a cult television show. It's called "The Pink Opaque," a fictional creation by the filmmaker that's reminiscent of several TV programs aimed at both adults and teens of the story's era.

It revolves around a supernatural gimmick, in which two teenage girls, named Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), discover they have a psychic connection at summer camp. The rest of the series, as Owen soon learns, follows the two teens as they fight monsters-of-the-week and uncover a mystical conspiracy, using their shared telepathic ability to communicate with each other without ever meeting in person.

As a kid (played by Ian Foreman) a couple years before high school, Owen just wants to watch the show, but his parents (played by Danielle Deadwyler and Fred Durst) have a strict bedtime for their son before the program airs on Saturday nights. By chance, Owen meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) while she's engrossed in the show's official episode guide, and after learning the kid can't watch this show that he already finds so fascinating, Maddy comes up with a plan.

Owen will tell his parents that he's sleeping over at an old friend's house, but he'll actually go to her house to watch an episode of the show. With that, the fascination becomes an obsession.

The narrative exists exclusively in a bubble of Owen's experiences and perspective—walking down the hall of high school two years later and being surrounded by the notes Maddy makes on the VHS cassettes with recorded episodes, hearing distant yelling and crashing upstairs when he spends the night at Maddy's house, speaking directly to the camera about a life that now revolves around sneaking watches and re-watches of episodes without his father, who thinks it's a show "for girls," catching him. All of these other characters exist within that context, in a way, with Maddy as the sympathetic gateway for Owen and a mystery otherwise, the mother as a kindhearted figure whose influence is hampered by her husband, and the father as a man so distant that he might as well be absent but so powerful that he might as well be omnipresent.

Mostly, the story is a collection of little details that put us in Owen's mindset, while subtly creating signposts for the big questions of the central mysteries and the build-up to the emotional impact of the third act (Note, for example, how Owen mainly sees his father lying on the couch watching old TV shows from afar and how the idea of that image is repeated later in close-up). The mysteries here are practical, after Maddy announces her plan for the two of them to run away together (How Owen tries to get out of it without making the decision for himself says everything about him—his fear, his indecisiveness, his need to please, not offend, and match the expectations forced upon him). They also border on the surreal, as Owen starts to imagine either that he's part of the show or that the show is somehow as real as real life—or more so.

The specifics of the show and its apparently deep mythology aren't as important as how they're something appealing, a bit dangerous, and all-consuming to Owen. In a similar way, the elaborate narrative, which features jumps in time and an entirely unreliable narrator and whole scenes—in reality and on TV—that might not exist as we see them through Owen's eyes, is far less vital than the overpowering feeling that something is fundamentally wrong or just off about this entire scenario.

To focus on the plot or the mystery of what happens to Maddy, who leaves behind a burning TV set after her beloved show is cancelled, would be a mistake. Schoenbrun makes that point clear by way of musical interludes full of longing (The entire soundtrack pulses with melancholy), a clever use of aspect ratio to further bleed the realms of fantasy and reality together, and haunting imagery. The stuff from the show, such as a monster made of ice cream that melts and a Big Bad in the form of a man in the moon, is disturbing, but the gradual shift from the neighborhood's neon-chalked streets to plain-old and brightly lit "normalcy" is eerie in its own way.

The cumulative effect of I Saw the TV Glow is potent. It's like gradually awakening from a frightening dream that, regardless, one knows has to be safe into a world that's a mundane, suffocating nightmare. The film's penultimate primal scream of abject terror is the only appropriate response, although it's somehow less tragic than the moment that immediately follows it.

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