‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: Jane Schoenbrun Explores the Dark Sides of Nostalgia in Their Standout Sophomore Feature | Berlinale 2024

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun shook the film world with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair three years ago. In a swift move, the film announced the arrival of a new voice whose complex resonances can reanimate the vacant lots in our ever-growing mediascape. Now, to continue a declared ‘Screen Trilogy,’ comes I Saw the TV Glow, making its way to Europe after its world premiere in Sundance last month. Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature screened in the Panorama sidebar and to no surprise became the festival’s hottest ticket. Any devout cinema goer, when faced with this film’s splendiferous presence on a large scale screen, would want to savor the experience of being so palpably close to a dream world. Truth is, we don’t know how and neither did Jane Schoenbrun, until now.

While the 90s fantasy world of the safe American suburbs is in full swing, a seventh grader named Owen feels like that same world is closing in on him. His asthma and his anxiety take turns to remind him he’s different, but the physical dimensions of his unease conveyed by actor Justice Smith (Jurassic World, Dungeons & Dragons) as the character grows up is not easy to articulate. In the world of I Saw the TV Glow time and space may look familiar—and familiarly drenched in 90s nostalgia—but they feel surreal and odd; as a result, the bodies that move through them and the characters’ driving forces are also somewhat askew. It’s Schoenbrun’s world-building sensibility and their multi-fold understanding of the medium’s capacities that serve as a basis for such a hypnotic affair. Visually, Eric Yue’s camera can be both light and heavy when focusing on the character’s faces; it can be equally demanding when standing at a distance, statically, framing a young Owen lit up by the TV at night for what seems like minutes at a time (when it’s probably around five seconds). 

Such aesthetic consistency would come as no surprise to those familiar with We’re All Going to The World’s Fair, but factoring in the director’s propensity to use surfaces as storytelling mechanisms—be it the screens, or the faces they illuminate—one should expect some compelling metaphors at play. In this case, that is a late-night TV show airing weekly at the Young Adult Network, called The Pink Opaque (its storyline indebted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer among other 90s classics). Just note how succulent the alliteration of it sounds when said out loud and you’ve guessed it, the film and its characters are deeply embedded in this fictional TV world as mise-en-abyme. 

One day, Owen spots the slightly older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine from Atypical, Amelia’s Children, and more) at school, reading an episode guide to The Pink Opaque. As soon as he dares to question her about the book, Maddy’s standoffish demeanor softens: enter their shared era of obsession. Supernatural realms, telepathic communication, monsters of the week, complex mythology: all these words are key for us 90s kids who stayed up late watching (in secret) TV we shouldn’t have. That kind of seriality, powered by cliffhangers and weekly doses of anticipation, offered a refuge for many adolescent outcasts whose world felt as permeable as the supernatural shows on television. “Do you ever feel like you’re watching your life play out in front of you?,” asks Maddy, and this question contains a dislocation, a scission between mind and body, between self and self-perception that is at the core of experiencing dysphoria, and more specifically, as Schoenbrun has indicated, pre-transition dysphoria. 

While it is of utmost importance to discuss the film through the lens of queer and trans cinema and in the ways it queers the cinematic apparatus, another standout feature of Jane Schoenbrun’s filmmaking is their talent to give metaphors and symbols a very tactile presence in the film world. The TV screen being pliable, being both mirror, portal, and window, is just one of those examples, but there are other, more spectacular instances in I Saw The TV Glow where the material representation of a metaphorical transformation is captivating to the point where its literalness, in turn, seems dreamy rather than real. Reality does not exist and this is a radically liberating stance that Schoenbrun’s cinema takes on; only when understanding this context of hyperrealism and the haunts of (im)possible futures, every gesture can have political meaning. It’s a paradox, perhaps, to conceive of materiality as oneiric and of fiction as political, but what a film like I Saw the TV Glow can show us, is that the only time machine for feelings we can hope for is cinema, as sensual and as fiercely beautiful as this.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 74th Berlin Film Festival where I Saw the TV Glow played in the Panorama section. The film will next be seen at the SXSW Film Festival in March and released in the U.S. by A24.