On May 14, 2024, at 1:13a.m., I posted the following review to Letterboxd: “FUCK YOU JANE SCHOENBRUN HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME HOW FUCKING DARE YOU.”
Five stars.
My hands were shaking as my friend and I left the theater after watching “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024) for the first time. It was past midnight and the lobby was eerily empty. Even the employees had seemingly abandoned us, and the only sounds were the echoes of our footsteps and the electric hum of the lights. By the time we reached my car, I was approaching hysterics, laughing nervously and tearfully glancing around the dark parking garage. Time felt wrong, thick and slippery; my sense of reality slanted.
Dear reader, I’m going to offer you a movie-watching experience like none you’ve ever had before. But it will cost you something.
“I Saw the TV Glow” is a coming-of-age horror film from director Jane Schoenbrun. The movie follows eighth-grader Owen (Justice Smith) as he is introduced to a “Buffy”-like TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’ by Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a girl a few grades above him. The two bond over their love of the show until Maddy vanishes from their suburb without a trace. A decade later, her reappearance for Owen begins to blur the line between reality and the world of ‘The Pink Opaque.’
I’ll avoid saying much else about the plot in this review because I hope you give this movie as blind a watch as possible, and also because I’m not sure I could describe the plot if I tried.
“Time felt wrong, thick and slippery; my sense of reality slanted”
“I Saw the TV Glow” is steeped in melancholic early 2000s nostalgia, rendering suburban liminal spaces with such emotional accuracy they feel like resurfaced memories. Characters wander through empty school hallways, wood-paneled basements and deflated children’s bouncy houses, all bathed in bisexual lighting. The surreal visuals and quietly detached performances from Smith and Lundy-Paine make the film feel like a bad dream, one that the viewer doesn’t quite know how to wake up from when they leave the theater.
Some reviewers call the film pretentious or plotless. Others praise its originality and killer soundtrack. But strangely, some reviews barely seem to be about the movie at all. The most liked review on Letterboxd opens: “My name is Julie. I am a trans woman. And tonight is the first time I’ve said those words to anyone other than myself.”
Across the internet, people are sharing their stories of how the film gave them the push they needed to start their transition. “I Saw the TV Glow” is not a movie about being trans in the way that other recent mainstream movies are. There’s no heartwarming dress-shopping montage or tearful coming out scene; the word “transgender” is never uttered. And yet, people credit Jane Schoenbrun with pulling something out of them they weren’t fully aware was there.
This is all the result of Schoenbrun’s unconventional brand of filmmaking. “I Saw the TV Glow” requires a uniquely high level of audience participation for a mainstream movie. Critics are partially correct when they claim the film has very little plot, but they miss the point: you, the viewer, are meant to provide the connective tissue of the story.
It goes beyond simply relating with the characters or their circumstances. Without your personal experiences — half-remembered summer nights, the arc of your own intense but fleeting friendship — the movie is not complete. Regardless of whether or not you are prepared to hand those parts of yourself over, “I Saw the TV Glow” will take them and spin them into a surreal nightmare.
It’s an approach to storytelling that won’t work for everyone by design. But when it clicks, Schoenbrun’s existential horror crawls under your skin and lays its eggs there. Nothing else is able to instill deep dread and paranoia quite like a horror movie about you. It can make you question your own hazy memories, your sense of time or identity.
I feel the need to reiterate that I am recommending this movie.
I’m certainly not saying that you have to be trans to participate in this film’s experience. If you’re queer, if you’re neurodivergent, if you’ve ever sleepwalked through suburban adolescence, if you’ve ever clung to television as a life raft while the rest of your life turned to static — you may be entitled to financial compensation. And this movie might change your life.
“I Saw the TV Glow” offers viewers the same experience ‘The Pink Opaque’ does for Owen and Maddy: a vision of a world that could be more real than the one you live in now. There’s only one way to find out if it will have the same effect on you. Why not pop in the VHS, bask in the glow of the static and try crawling through the television screen?
Niko Kay Smith SC ’25 is someone beautiful and powerful, far away on the other side of a television screen. ‘A Nightmare on 6th St’ is TSL’s new horror column, where Niko covers their journey from scaredy cat to rabid horror fan, one movie at a time.
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