Weird and wonderful tale like some kind of fever dream (2024)

I Saw The TV Glow

(M. 100 minutes)

4 stars

A while back there was a briefly popular TikTok trend where kids made films of themselves walking around to a "main character" voiceover, like they were Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City narrating their own experience. There's a similar feel to I Saw The TV Glow, except this is a horror film, not a throwaway TikTok gag.

In one scene Justice Smith's character walks down a high school corridor and the screen fills with text or symbols, like the character has walked right into an episode of Heartstopper, or, with this being an American film set in the 90s, perhaps morphed into one of the characters on Freaks and Geeks or My So Called Life.

Jane Schoenbrun's film is so meta, so self-aware and referential of the television shows its characters adore, that it is hard to pick apart what is supposed to be reality or fantasy for its characters.

I'd liken the viewing experience to some kind of fever dream, and the last time I experienced something like it was the extraordinary Episode 8 of David Lynch's 2017 season of Twin Peaks, which was almost incomprehensible but also brilliant.

It is the 1990s and the YA fantasy teen series The Pink Opaque hits all the notes that series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer would land in our real world.

In this film world, awkward teens Owen (Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) meet and immediately bond over their love of The Pink Opaque.

The show has been banned in Owen's home and so Maddy is his dealer-of-sorts, sharing VHS tapes with this younger kid she befriends.

The commonality between them is their outsider status at school, but they both have different relationships with the show that is their mutual obsession.

When Owen is asked if he is gay, he says he doesn't love anyone or anything, just television.

Maddy, meanwhile, might be non-binary if growing up in our age, but in the 1990s the syntax wasn't really in place so Maddy refers to themselves as gay.

When the network cancels the show, their friendship falls apart, Maddy disappearing for years and Owen continuing to base his identity around the show.

Stylistically, the show throws so many things at you that it is sometimes overwhelming.

The fragments of The Pink Opaque we see are shot on old VHS tape, very grainy and highly contrasting to the rest of the film, which was shot on 35mm film stock by cinematographer Eric Yue.

There are too many references, visual and narrative, to mention but stylistically I'd point to the V/H/S horror anthology and of course Lynch.

Horror might be too strong a word, though, while weird is apt but has recently been co-opted by politics.

But like the sculpture being installed outside the National Gallery of Australia, the film and show chase each other around the narrative and eat their own tails, until we and the characters struggle to recognise where the intersection is happening

For fans of the esoteric, of chaos, of Lynch, even of Donnie Darko, this will seem brilliant - I carefully use "seem" because this is going to take some slow unpacking at a later date.

For folk who like their narratives with three clear acts and understandable resolutions, well, those people are going to really complain about the four stars I gave this film.

Performances are strong. Smith has a hefty resume including Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, and plays a nervous and unsure figure looking for identity.

I totally get it, having overidentified for decades with Doctor Who and Buffy and Blake's 7.