I Saw the TV Glow review: A remarkable mystery drama that speaks directly to the trans experience

I Saw the TV Glow could be the hand on your shoulder that you didn’t know you needed. It’s a film about the things offered by art that could never be articulated within a critic’s review. So, in a way, anything I write beyond this point is defunct. But I’ll do my best. Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to their 2021 thriller We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a film about how art sometimes knows us before we know ourselves, and how we can spend decades trying to unpick its secrets in the search for a truth we’re maybe too afraid to accept.

It’s about two kids whom we first meet in 1996, Owen (a haunting Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, piercing and urgent), and their relationship with a late-night supernatural TV show called The Pink Opaque. The series is a mildly surrealist monster-of-the-week drama about two friends (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who communicate from either side of their county via telepathy. Critics would describe it as a mix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks.

Schoenbrun never makes the argument that The Pink Opaque is good or artistically worthy. That’s irrelevant. Certainly it looks cool, because Schoenbrun has such a confident handle on cultish Nineties aesthetics – there’s a sentient, melting ice cream, and a man in the moon called Mr Melancholy (Emma Portner), drawn straight from the imagination of cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.

Owen (who we meet younger, at first, and played by Ian Foreman) sees ads for The Pink Opaque on TV. Then he comes across Maddy, in a dark corner of the school cafeteria, reading an episode guide on the show. She only lowers the book from her face when he says he recognises the name. It airs after his bedtime, so he lies to his parents about sleeping over at a friend’s house, and watches it at Maddy’s house instead.

By the time the episode ends, Maddy is in tears. We don’t know why. The pair’s conversations about the show only seem to concern its narrative and its lore. But, still, it’s crawled up into their hearts. Maddy embraces it, and it transforms her life. Owen, meanwhile, denies all and represses all. We watch him grow old, and I Saw the TV Glow becomes a silent scream of a tragedy.

Schoenbrun here is speaking explicitly to the trans experience, which bubbles beneath every conversation. “This isn’t how life is supposed to feel,” Maddie tells Owen. Time moves too fast. Nothing feels right. Why are all the tables in the cafeteria upturned? Why do shopping carts seem to congregate outside the mall like predators? I Saw the TV Glow is set in a twilight world, somewhere between mundanity, a faded memory, and the intrusive terrors of The Pink Opaque’s monsters.

Good allegories, of course, feel infinite. And I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer. “When I think about that stuff it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides,” Owen says. “But I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.” Schoenbrun’s film bottles the intensity of that feeling, and how frightening it is to be seen when you can’t see yourself.

Dir: Jane Schoenbrun. Starring: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Conner O’Malley, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler. 15, 100 mins.

‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is in cinemas from 26 July