150 Word Review: 'I Saw The TV Glow' (2024)
Twin peeks
In I Saw The TV Glow, Owen and Maddy, high school misfits, share the same pop culture obsession.
The pair sit in a dark basement, their faces illuminated by a cult 90s TV show called The Pink Opaque—a supernatural drama about two tattooed teens fighting the evil Mr. Melancholy. These characters are telepathically linked and meet in a dimension beyond space and time. A safe space.
To Owen and Maddy, everything makes sense on the other side of the screen. This is a poignant fable for anyone who has hidden inside art and found their people/themselves.
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun casts an eerie spell—sad but confident. The real world is dim and claustrophobic, briefly illuminated by electric colors: pinks, purples, blues. Justice Smith's Owen is a profoundly tragic character, a human anchor slowly falling. Some of us escape and become who we truly are, while others don't.
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Grief. Friendship. Jazz hands.
My debut memoir, ‘Theatre Kids’, comes out June 18th. You can preorder now on Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble.
I like this review—it doesn’t get into the technicalities or plot of the film but talks to the larger issues of identity that it’s really about