I Saw the TV Glow drizzles VHS sleepovers and Buffy re-runs over an existential crisis

I Saw the TV Glow. // Courtesy A24

Jane Schoenbrun’s premiere with A24 has been one of our most anticipated feature films, leaving us dangling in wait for several years since the first announcement. The writer-director’s breakthrough flick We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is one of those difficult-to-describe pieces of magic—a horror isolation adventure born of the pandemic, creepypasta, online brain, and dripping in dream tone. If anything about this review pings a distinct receptor in your brain, I advise tracking that film down on streaming ASAP. But not before you race to the theaters to see this new plummet into the abyss.

I Saw the TV Glow teleports us back to 1996, where Bill Clinton is about to win the election and some of the final days of monoculture are upon us. A couple of high school outsiders find themselves drawn to a TV show (equivalent to Buffy) that airs on (equivalent to The CW) late on Saturday nights.

Seventh grader Owen (Ian Foreman as a young kid, Justice Smith for the rest of the film) meets ninth grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) they wind up spiraling with fascination over The Pink Opaque—a program from back when nothing was on demand or DVD, and the mere act of staying up late enough to watch involved lying about sleepovers with a different friend. Life is about micro-transgressions in pursuit of perceived forbidden-adjacent art, and the process of standing in The Pink Opaque‘s world requires an almost religious devotion to learning the deep lore of the fictional world, while its same rules and opportunities for joy and companionship are denied to its fans in the real world.

I Saw the TV Glow. // Courtesy A24

Together, at Void High School—yes, there’s a VHS Jazz Band and we will be buying the inevitable letterman jackets from A24—these two protagonists use their obsession with a fictional world to mold a version of a space where they can be themselves, in joy, safety, and far from the isolation of the great disconnect that the late 90s brings.

Owen’s overprotective mother (Danielle Deadwyler) and distant and verbally abusive father (Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, yes really) serve as emotional anchors preventing him from developing, while Maddy’s physically abusive father has established patterns that Maddy knows will lead to their death if they stay in that house.

Maddy mysteriously disappears, their favorite TV program is immediately cancelled with a bizarre cliffhanger ending, and Owen is left to figure out how to salvage his life.

Years later, he uses Maddy’s secret stash of VHS recorded episodes of The Pink Opaque to begin rewatching the series from the beginning. What it summons is horrific, mundane, earth-shattering, gross, brilliant, and a goddamned mess for all.

Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow tackles the human experience through a very American modernity-tarnished experience of seeing the world through the media we take in. This manages to prop up both extremes as a reaction: for two characters that represent youth that were lost in the 90s amid a lack of terminology to explain identities, they find acceptance through cathode rays and a shared obsession. Who doesn’t forever love and hold in high esteem the first movie or show that made them feel “seen.” But placing your trust in pop culture so often leads to a cliff.

I Saw the TV Glow. // Courtesy A24

As is the case with real-world equivalent Buffy, the formative show for a generation of weirdos is now tarnished by moments that don’t hold up, cheap effects, and the influence of problematic creators. The modern revisit makes outsiders seem even stranger. Imagining trying to explain how important this all was while showing it to your teenage kid must make you seem a little off your rocker. But what happens to fandom when they go so far in on an idea that, when it ages badly, so does reality itself?

I Saw the TV Glow is a triumph, for its achievement in tackling our media addictions by both throwing them a parade and burying them alive. Schoenbrun’s visuals blend the hypnotic with the blur of the familiar—at one point described in the film as madness not being discernable from just how things are in the suburbs. As much as there is comfort to be found in the memories of these internal highs, Schoenbrun does not buy into the trap of nostalgia. They instead opt for a “nowstalgia” where it’s fun to look back on the past, but there’s no desire to return to that time and place to live forever; no concept that 1996 was the height of existence. Whatever Stranger Things wants to make you feel, this is the opposite.

Visually and narratively, this is a breath of fresh air using the secret language of my own formative years. That it goes the extra mile with the most impressive soundtrack in years—one that puts Phoebe Bridgers on screen and on stage in this world’s version of Buffy’s club Bronze—is just the extra mile making I Saw the TV Glow one of the most mysterious, navel-gazing fucked-up queer horror fantasies to get wide theatrical release. It almost certainly will make end of year “Best Of” lists for anyone who sees this feature for what it is—and what it chooses not to be.