I Saw the TV Glow

In I Saw the TV Glow, cripplingly anxious Owen (Justice Smith) recalls a childhood obsession with The Pink Opaque, a Buffy-coded YA TV series he's introduced to by fellow outsider Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). The grotesque demons within the distorted CRT TV provide texture and superficial scares, but the real horror of the film is the concept of time wasted, of living in denial of one’s true nature. Either because of the potency of late-90s small-town conformity culture or fear of his oppressive father (Fred Durst), Owen feels a need to distance himself from this “show for girls.”

Told out of order by a character too scared to question his own story, the film is a coming-of-age gone wrong, twisted up in unreliable narration, time skips and a dissolving membrane between “real life” and The Pink Opaque’s Midnight Realm. Director Jane Schoenbrun’s previous feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, set a precedent in alienated, adolescent protagonists, suburban backdrops and escapist media’s offer of identity and belonging. I Saw the TV Glow renders these themes in ultraviolet colour palettes, and more vividly depicts the monstrous entities working at the fringes of the fantasy.

The allegory of trans repression is patent, even without Schoenbrun divulging their intentions in interviews. More abstracted is mortality; life, death, self-harm and suicide all take on disguised meanings. A Cronenbergian thrill ride and a domestic nightmare, I Saw The TV Glow is a multi-channel mind-fuck.

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Released 26 Jul by Park Circus; certificate 15