The deep horror of actually attempting to truly know yourself fuels Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature I Saw the TV Glow, a nightmarish, unique, and astonishing piece of work that catapults Schoenbrun right towards the top of the pile of the young auteurs currently making names for themselves. A fascinating and distressing work of allegorical queer self-realisation and repression as well as a study of the poisoned well of nostalgia, it’s an indefinable thing; part horror, part coming-of-age drama, all bathed in a surreal neon light that draws you in to the point of suffocation.
Set across about a decade from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen (Ian Foreman as a kid, Justice Smith as a teen and adult), a boy deeply struggling with feelings he can’t, or maybe actually just won’t, articulate to either himself or others. Lost at home with a terminally ill mum and a mostly silent but loomingly threatening dad, he finds a kindred spirit in older girl Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who introduces him to TV show ‘The Pink Opaque’, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like teen supernatural drama that consumes the pair of them. It’s an obsession they share, just as queer kids of Schoenbrun’s generation found a perfect outlet in Buffy, that breaks down the barriers between their real lives and fiction, creating a fragile mental state in Owen that only fractures further when Maddy suddenly goes missing.
Schoenbrun infuses every frame with a sort of ever-expanding dread (even the visuals of ‘The Pink Opaque’ are much, much creepier than anything Buffy ever conjured up), which build to a series of just unbelievable crescendos across the film. Reality strains and shreds under the sheer pressure of Owen’s obsessions and self-denial (he frequently addresses us directly in to-camera monologues that get more and more frantic as the story goes on), rich, glowing visuals and a sublime soundtrack making for a discomfortingly immersive experience.
It’s all building to an absurdly bold and upsetting ending, one that looks to be heading in a bittersweet direction before pushing itself to a profoundly bleak logical conclusion, a perfect confluence of Schoenbrun’s fearless writing and direction and a revelatory performance from Smith. Both he and Lundy-Paine put in (by miles) career-best work here – this script and these roles ask a hell of a lot the pair of them to really sell, and they both deliver flawlessly.
This switch from potentially-supernatural horror (the whole film exists in a heightened reality, where you can attend ‘The Void’ high school and downed power lines can seemingly bring in artefacts from some other reality) into an entirely serious, realistic, and personal tragedy could have easily sunk I Saw the TV Glow. Yet, in Schoenbrun’s assured hands, it instead takes something great and pushes it into masterwork status. It’s not often I can say that I was actively *upset* by a film. Made sad, sure, or scared or frustrated, definitely, but not with the kind of skin-prickling distress that follows you out of the cinema wishing like hell things could have been different for those characters – yet I Saw the TV Glow does exactly this. It’s a remarkable and unique achievement from a remarkable and unique film.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 