I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Watched 5/18/24 (theater)

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is an A24 piece, through and through. The studio’s signature descent-into-madness trajectory is fused here with a wealth of ideas about how media like movies and television can both shape and ruin us. The ideas stem from an entire fictional TV show created just for the movie’s universe. Unfortunately, the writer/director was so preoccupied with establishing and tearing down this TV show’s mythology that they seemingly gave naught but an afterthought to the dialogue, characters and plot-point sequencing.

The dialogue that is present in the film is delivered mostly through equally glum and pretentious monologues, punched down further by a directing choice to have every actor speak with their library voice in as awkward of cadences as possible. A lack of variety makes itself abundantly clear as we follow Owen and Maddie, two grade-school/high-school outsiders who find solace in a late-night young-adult TV series titled The Pink Opaque.

Schoenbrun pours on detail upon detail about how the show consumes the characters’ lives. As the characters make sure we understand step-by-step, they lose themselves to boring lives enriched and then self-destructed by The Pink Opaque, which is itself a horror series both on-screen and in what it eventually reveals to the characters.

The aforementioned monologues are the low-energy through-line of the film, narrating even via fourth-wall-breaks what happens to the characters including familial deaths, moves to new locations and lives, large time jumps, and more. It’s all jarring in that it so blatantly and totally breaks the show-don’t-tell rule that, while not mandatory, exists for a reason in the world of cinematic do’s and don’t’s. We skip over various life events that seem deserving of time and patience and are instead cast aside in favor of more monologues.

Characters narrating their relationship to a fictional television property can only sustain so much screen-time, and this feels more like a short film that the director decided to stretch in order to be able to overindulge in their own obsession. Whether or not that selfish overindulgence works for audiences is up for debate, but the self-interest of the director is certainly plain, for me, to the point of frustration.

No character ever acts or speaks in a normal fashion, and the ideas they so ostentatiously hyperventilate to deliver aren’t cleverly enough mused upon to be able to leave much of a mark. It boils down to a back-and-forth faux-philosophical debate on whether or not this Pink Opaque was worth watching and how it may have shaped or imprisoned the youth. There’s a more audience-friendly way of portraying that which doesn’t include painfully overblown oddity for the sake of oddity. If you are going to have characters speak the way these two do, having an audience avatar character and a more tangible, literal story to balance the otherworldliness would behoove the entertainment value. This is a short story in the hands of bad narrators, dragged out to 100 minutes and without anything to latch onto emotionally or physically.

2/10