Two teenagers connect over their shared adoration of a young adult 90’s television series only to find themselves increasingly lost in the dreary world around them…

I go back and forth between struggling to recommend I Saw the TV Glow on account of its genre-less, confounding nature, and consequently thinking it may be the most important millennial film of the decade. It took me a few times watching I Saw the TV Glow for it to infect me with its indescribable magnetism, but it was one I kept coming back to over and over again. 

I Saw the TV Glow is an uncompromising vision from a filmmaker at the absolute height of their craft, channeling the cinematic menagerie of nostalgia and an ethereal dreamscape into a melancholic, understated tragedy of being trapped in a life against your will. 

I Saw the TV Glow is unabashedly a film about the trans experience (it can be easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, but the movie very overtly acclaims as such even going so far as to use a children’s parachute decorated in trans-flag colors at the film’s outset), but its thematic nature speaks to the core of everyone.

I’m not an authority to speak on the trans experience, but I am an authority on what it means to feel trapped, confounded by the machinations of an oppressive world that seems to conflate anxieties within my brain and pronounce them as monsters within my thoughts.

I don’t mean to use this review as a diary or a declaration of my own mental illness, but instead I mean to draw attention to the universality of the human condition and how I Saw The TV Glow speaks so loudly to it. (Slight spoilers in the next sentence) The structure of the film is a masterwork, deliberately depriving itself of a third act as a reflection of the central character’s plight in settling within the confines of imprisonment.

This speaks nothing for the soundtrack, a carefully curated list of songs that director Jane Schoenbrun advocated for from their favorite artists that essentially defined the film and culminated in one of the most provocative literary compliments to a movie that I can remember. Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old, a new contender for my favorite song of all time, speaks to a yearning for times now past, moments when we were young and couldn’t appreciate the simplicity of youthful connection.

There is perhaps nothing more comforting to a depressive state than the feeling of shared experience. The morbidity of hearing, “I think I was born bored, I think I was born blue, I think I was born wanting more, I think I was born already missing you,” may feel to some like an irrelevant literary device, a narrative structure to a song that sounds pretty and sad, but to me Claw Machine is a ballad that speaks to the film’s core identity.

One day, perhaps, I can write a retrospective breaking down each of the film’s songs and identifying their influence on the film itself, but for now I will resign to these few moments to spare the modest readership of this review from my sombre musings. The performances in I Saw the TV Glow are hyper stylized often harkening back to 90’s Television melodrama to better influence the film’s central plot.

At times, this attention to detail with the direction of the performances can cause a lack of relatability for the audience, particularly those who may have no familiarity with the homages of such stylized work. There are things that this film discusses that seem to be entirely unique to the way Schoenbrun talks about them. The hyper fixation of nostalgia pieces (“sometimes, the Pink Opaque feels more real than real life”) and the isolation of such emphatic draws to art that somehow remove us from connectivity to the world, only to then discover the unabashed preciousness in finding someone of a like mind to share with.

The collective unconsciousness that leaves us all meandering through the halls of a dreamscape, blinking as years pass by in a fugue of dissociative identity. The fear of breaking out of the mold of comfortability.

The desperate cry that you apologize for that no one even hears as you’re left prisoner to your own mind and body. If you relate to none of these, then perhaps I am alone in my adoration of I Saw the TV Glow, but for those who are willing to linger here, for those willing to engage with this film’s dreary liminal space between dream and wake… This is for us. “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” 9.5/10