2024 | PG-13 | starring Justice Smith, Ian Foreman, Brigette Lundy-Paine | written & directed by Jane Schoenbrun | 1h 40m | 3 out of 5 stars |
Young, lonely high schooler Owen (Ian Foreman and Justice Smith) bonds with classmate Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine Bill and Ted Face the Music) over his favorite show, The Pink Opaque, a show that becomes more important to him as his life, family and sanity start to collapse around him.
I Saw the TV Glow is a beautifully made movie, top to bottom, both visually and sonically. The film is lovingly crafted in a thick, moody, atmosphere that show-dips the viewer into a dreamlike state. An atmosphere I’m now apparently supposed to call vibes. This movie is a vibe. It well captures the feeling of being a lonely child in high school, so introverted and insecure that the best way they can socialize with others is through a shared TV show, but also the 90s itself, where sharing a show meant passing around VHS tapes and mixes of your favorite episodes, scheduling a time to watch that show live and warning friends that it’s just a rerun this week.
Aesthetically it has a lot in common with the criminally under-seen Sci-Fi channel series Channel Zero, a moody period piece as well that featured a mind-melting children’s show, Candle Cove, in it’s first season. It also seems to share nostalgic DNA with the 90s-set tale of teen angst, Super Dark Times, a movie I gave 5-stars back in 2017 and still hold in high regard. Glow isn’t quite as effective as both of those movies, but there is a lot here to like, even if it remains an artistic calling card for writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, who previously gave us the creepy HBO internet found footage movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
Ultimately, Glow doesn’t evolve into much more than a very beautiful vibe. I was rooting for Schoenbrun to find a story that matched he tone and instead what we got was a diversion into Chronenberg territory with an ending out of Videodrome. Young Ian Foreman is very good as young Owen, but Justice Smith (Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves)’s raspy voice isn’t ready to carry the role of narrator and he remains at an emotional arm’s length from us. It’s increasingly unclear why this is happening to Owen. Early on it is made clear that there is nothing sinister about The Pink Opaque and that this is a story of a young boy’s obsession with it. Another fashionable Descent-into-Madness movie. A sad story of a generation of lost boys, who couldn’t make friends, whose family disintegrated in the background and who were raised by the TV. I get all of that and I’m completely on board, but where the film goes is almost unforgivably cruel – and not in a horror movie way, as the movie unequivocally is not a horror movie. It instead co-opts and wears the genre around under the guise of Elevated Horror in an attempt to find an ending.
I Saw the TV Glow, most likely unintentionally, provides a gender counter-weight to what I said about movies like I Used to Be Funny. In that movie a depressed woman has every social safety net from friends to ex-boyfriends attempting to pull her out of her mental state. A young man in such a state is simply put into a depression free fall and ends up like Owen, spit out the bottom of society. In a time when nostalgia has become a dirty word for how Hollywood wields it like a weapon against us, it’s nice to see a sincere representation of a time and place from a point of view that is actually nostalgic.