Sundance ’24: Tortured ‘I SAW THE TV GLOW’ Reaches Through the Screen

Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious followup to their attention-grabbing debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is billed as a horror feature but it takes careful time developing said horror. And delivers a wallop. A quietly remarkable film, and one that spurred a handful of walkouts during its Sundance premiere, I Saw The TV Glow is not an easily accessible film. But with just a little thought, investment, and excavation, this handsomely-mounted ethereal slowburn will be sure to worm its way deep under your skin and suck you into the screen.

By their own admission, writer-director Schoenbrun is invested in telling queer stories from a queer perspective and you don’t have to dig deep to find the not-so-subterranean message about identity, transition, and the pain of denying your true self. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine star as Owen and Maddy, two teens whose lives become inexplicably intertwined with one another’s and a late night young adult horror TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’.

Owen first meets Maddy in the high school gymnasium where he played the parachute game as a young boy mystified by its colors. He’s drawn to her as if by some unspoken, invisible power. Perhaps it’s her queerness that indices the boy, who, by his own account, describes his own budding sexuality as “hollowed out”. It comes as no surprise that Owen’s gruff, conservative father chastises his interest in a “show for girls”.

The few masculine presences in the film invoke a sense of lingering, omnipresent danger. Maddy’s stepfather is never seen but you hear his thrashing, or her recounting his threats of physical violence. Later, Owen’s male coworkers mock his awkwardness around sexuality, flaunting their carnal conquests to intentionally make him quake with discomfort. Everyone but Maddy leads Owen further into himself; hiding even from himself. The melancholic small town world where Maddy and Owen live, as much as his own denial and self-hatred, are Owen’s catalyst for haunted repression.

Schoenbrun’s low-broiling creation mixes flashbacks, fourth-wall breaking, unreliable narration, and shifting POVs to draw the very reality of the film into question. Past and present scramble. Memory becomes unreliable, shaky. Nostalgia is Owen’s wobbly Rosetta Stone to comprehend his present reality. We’re left to wonder what is real, what is fiction, and what the difference between the two really is. As time passes, years disappear. With age, Owen eventually crumples into himself; wheezing, hunched, hollow.

Smith’s restrained performance is impressive, revealing, raw – his strained, soft vocal work effectively unnerving – while Lundy-Paine possesses a haunted quality that makes them impossible to look away from. Their chemistry emphasizes in each other the pain of finding acceptance – or refusing to look for it. Apologizing for your own existence is a terminal imprisonment and Smith’s anguish reveals how excruciating on the body and soul the lies become. The relatively quiet first couple acts lull the viewer into a sense of observant complacency, which only serves to make the explosive conclusion all the more disruptive and bold. It certainly isn’t your run of the mill horror movie, nor will it be for everyone. For those willing to stick it out, you will invariably be shaken, your sympathies stirred. In tortured quietude, Schoenbrun has made something impossible to ignore.

CONCLUSION: Jane Schoenbrun’s unsettling identity-horror unfolds itself slowly before crescendoing into something undeniably powerful and affecting. A startling film that won’t soon leave you, even when the TV stops glowing.