Review: I Saw The TV Glow – “like an episode of Stranger Things if filmed by David Lynch.”

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst, Amber Benson, Helena Howard

Owen (played by Ian Foreman as a boy, and Justice Smith when older) is an awkward schoolboy in small-town America in the 1990s – he seems to have no friends, he doesn’t even make eye contact with others (it may be that he has an undiagnosed condition), and home-life isn’t much better – his mother has a serious illness, which will claim her life fairly soon, and his father is a remote presence at best, but his few interactions are not encouraging (when Owen mentions wanting to be allowed to stay up to watch a show he has heard of, The Pink Opaque, his father gruffly proclaims “isn’t that a show for girls?”)

He first spots the Emo-esque Maddy (Bill and Ted Face the Music’s Brigette Lundy-Paine), sitting by herself, reading a book which he notices is an episode guide to The Pink Opaque (remember those? Pre-internet those paperback books of episode guides were our main way of finding out details of favourite series), and he later makes a shy, tentative approach to her. Maddy is also a misfit, playing the loner style card, but something about Owen causes her to slowly start reaching out to him, allowing him to come over to watch the show with her, while he tells his parents he’s having a sleepover at another friend’s house, and she starts sending him VHS copies of episodes she’s recorded.

The show itself features two main female characters, each with powers they are still exploring, and learning to work together to fight various preternatural monsters sent by the Big Bad of the series, Mister Melancholy, with echoes of actual 90s shows like Buffy or Charmed. And as with those real series, this becomes more than just a show to these two awkward, isolated kids – it’s not even that it is an obsession in watching it and talking about it, it starts to feel like elements of the show are real, more real and vibrant and important than their own lives.

When Maddy vanishes – she previously told Owen she needed to get out of this town, but he wouldn’t go after panicking – he continues with his life, a succession of boring, menial jobs, unable to even brighten these by befriending colleagues (he still can’t even meet their eyes), feeling trapped, not just in that life, but that life, meagre though it is, is flipping by faster and faster as he gets older (he likens it to skipping chapters on a DVD). Even rewatching the show, years later (now on streaming – he doesn’t even need to buy a tape now, he comments), it isn’t as he remembers, instead it is a cheap, cheesy show that he can’t relate to, totally different from his memories of it. When Maddy, long since considered missing and dead, returns, and claims to have seen into the “real” Pink Opaque, he’s unsure how to react.

I found this to be a fascinating piece – one of those films that comes along every now and then which doesn’t fit into an easy category (hurrah!). It’s part horror, part reality-bending drama, part coming-of-age tale, while the asexual nature of the relationship between the two leads (Maddy tells him early on she’s not into boys, Owen replies he’s just into TV shows, really), aided by having a non-binary actor in Lundy-Paine is refreshing, no forced romance, just two damaged souls who find a connection. It is beautifully filmed, filled with some wonderful visuals (for instance, glimpses of Mister Melancholy show a “man in the moon” face, a more disturbing version of the famous one from Voyage Dans La Lune). It’s beautiful and dreamlike, and doesn’t spoon-feed easy answers, leaving much of it to the audience to interpret (again, rather refreshing, I thought), with elements sometimes feeling a little like an episode of Stranger Things if filmed by David Lynch. Unusual.

Beautiful and touching in its own way, and one of the more unusual films you can catch this year.

I Saw the TV Glow is available to buy on digital from September 30th from A24.