‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Is a Singular, Hypnotically Engaging Look at Identity and Loneliness

‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Is a Singular, Hypnotically Engaging Look at Identity and Loneliness

By Alex McPherson

Director Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” is a dreamlike, thought-provoking, and emotionally gutting experience that’s at once personal and universal — an exploration of loneliness, art, escapism, and repression within a reality that’s its own kind of nightmare.

The year is 1996. We follow Owen (first played by Ian Foreman, then Justice Smith), a seventh-grader in a small, nondescript suburb that Shoenbrun frames like a dreary purgatory.

Owen lives a sheltered existence with his overprotective parents (played by Danielle Deadwyler and an exceptionally creepy Fred Durst). His father exerts a tight grip on the household, shunning Owen for his unconventional interests. Owen needs an escape, and he eventually finds it through a television set.

One evening, while wandering around his local high school (fittingly called “Void High”) waiting for his mother to cast a ballot for a local election, Owen finds ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading an episode guide for a TV show called “The Pink Opaque.”

The supernatural serial is an homage to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and features two girls, Tara and Isabel, who communicate via the astral plane. They fight various “monsters of the week,” with the all-powerful Mr. Melancholy pulling the strings and watching over them as a garish face on the moon. 

Maddy — wry, severe, and enduring a troubled home life— quickly strikes up a friendship with Owen, and Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s house for a sleepover to watch the show: he’s hooked. Maddy and Owen find “The Pink Opaque” to be an escape from reality: they’re outcasts who connect to the characters’ isolation, confusion, and eventual empowerment. They’re both stuck in a limbo that’s suffocating their developing minds and bodies, only finding solace via their heroes on the other side of the screen.  

Flash forward two years, and Owen continues to use “The Pink Opaque” as a way to cope with his trauma and gradually develop his sense of self, with Maddy leaving VHS recordings of each episode in Void High’s darkroom for him to take home.

Owen and Maddy’s obsession with the show grows, tragedy strikes, and the lines between reality and fantasy blur to increasingly psychedelic effect, as “The Pink Opaque” bleeds off the screen into Owen’s lived experience. He grapples with his true identity amid the weight of suffocating societal pressures and the rapid passage of time.

Indeed, “I Saw the TV Glow” is a disturbing and bleakly existential watch. Schoenbrun, in their second feature film, has a distinctive cinematic voice – presenting a story that’s both easy to become invested in and difficult to fully parse, evoking familiar themes in ways that prove constantly surprising, unsettling, and, at times, bewildering.

 It’s a film that refuses to explain itself and leaves the door open to different interpretations, particularly during its head-spinning conclusion. This is an obviously personal story for Schoenbraun, one that’s rendered in an uncompromising, polarizing style that says as much through its mood-setting as through dialogue.

Their approach allows us to feel what the characters are feeling as they drift through their nebulous environment, even as they themselves are unsure how to process what’s going on.

“I Saw the TV Glow,” in its patient, Lynchian rhythms, establishes a palpable sense of dread from its opening moments, as Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue thrust us into a wasteland where a sense of dreariness practically leaks off the screen – a dark, neon-infused, almost alien world that Owen and Maddy inhabit as outsiders unsure of life’s meaning.

Schoenbrun twists seemingly inviting spaces into symbols of malaise and menace despite their seeming banality, further emphasizing Owen’s alienation and perceived sense of “otherness.” This world represents an abyss that’s willing to swallow Owen and Maddy whole if they don’t fight to break free from its spell. 

The Pink Opaque, too – depicted in authentic detail with title cards, music, acting, and lo-fi effects from the era –- is both alluring and sinister. Owen and Maddy form a connection to another world that’s dictated by the whims of showrunners and networks; a dangerous reliance on an external source to find comfort in a place that’s all too willing to take it away.

Suffice to say, “I Saw the TV Glow” is quite a depressing watch, interspersed with moments of dry humor and supernatural imagery that may or may not be taking place in traditional “reality.”

We’re seeing the world through Owen’s eyes – portrayed by Foreman and Smith with a haunted melancholy giving way to mounting existential panic – and his truth is yearning to be embraced; the question is, will he realize it before his depression and dysphoria consume him? 

As the film progresses down its increasingly head-spinning path, “I Saw the TV Glow” maintains a grim momentum, as Owen wages an internal battle against prejudiced norms and his seeming lack of agency.

The evocative, thematically resonant soundtrack enhances the proceedings, furthering the sense that Owen and Maddy are living in a dream, and years swiftly pass while his conflict stays the same, visualized in sterling makeup work.

The real horror of “I Saw the TV Glow” is a battle of identity, of being reliant on technology and consumable entertainment for discovering who we are, rather than forging one’s own path in a dark, depressing world.

It’s a relevant message, if not an especially uplifting one – easy to connect to regardless of background. Owen’s, and Schoenbrun’s, stories may be unique to them, but few films in recent memory are as unsettling, poignant, or conversation-starting as “I Saw the TV Glow.” Whether or not you can get on board with its story and style, it’s an experience that won’t be easily forgotten.

“I Saw the TV Glow” is a 2024 horror-drama directed by Jane Schoenbrun and starring Ian Foreman, Justice Smith, Bigette Lundy-Paine, Danielle Deadwyler and Fred Durst. It is rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements and teen smoking and runtime is 1 hour, 40 minutes. It opened in theaters May 17. Became available Video on Demand on June 14 and DVD on July 30. Alex’s Grade: A.

Stylish Western ‘The Harder They Fall’ Falters with Flat Story

Stylish Western ‘The Harder They Fall’ Falters with Flat Story

By Lynn Venhaus
A good-looking film with a kicky soundtrack, “The Harder They Fall” comes across as a bloody western shot like a music video.

It’s no surprise, because first-time director Jeymes Samuel, a music producer and singer-songwriter known as The Bullitts, is a protégé of Jay-Z and worked with him on “The Great Gatsby” soundtrack for director Baz Luhrmann. Under his real name, Shawn Carter, Jay-Z is one of the film’s producers.

Samuel demonstrates an appealing slick style, but sadly the well-worn story lacks substance. Co-written by veteran screenwriter Boaz Yakin and Samuel as a tale of revenge and robbery, it’s merely ordinary – without much character development, squanders the talents of its extraordinary cast that includes solid-gold Idris Elba, Regina King and Delroy Lindo, with rising stars Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz and LaKeith Stanfield, who just gets better with every role.

The lethal shoot-outs and blood-spurting showdowns, an integral part of the western genre, are repetitive and do little to advance a gripping story. Overall, the plot is run-of-the-mill, mostly predictable, except for the third act revelation.

It’s unfortunate because you want to root for this type of new western that spotlights black cowboys. Supposedly, on the western frontier, one in four cowboys were black, and they haven’t been given proper due in America’s history on ‘go west’ and the great migration.

In the beginning, the director states that the story is fiction, but the people existed. Most of the action takes place in Redwood City, which was a primarily black community.

Faring well in this film are emerging stars Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee, who identifies as him and would like a career in law enforcement, and Edi Gathegi as Bill Pickett, a young trigger-happy hotshot.

RJ Cyler has a solid turn as sharpshooter Jim Beckworth as does Deon Cole as Wiley Escoe, but it is Majors’ film. His outlaw Nat Love, no matter how many times he’s intimidated or dismissed, is driven and relentless.

Playing a man of few words who acts quickly, Elba’s physicality is felt throughout, a foreboding presence from the opening scene where he takes down a family, to breaking out of chains in prison stripes, and then as a feared frontier gang leader.

An interesting twist is how fierce the women are – Regina King as “Treacherous Trudy” and Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary. They take the bullets out of their guns and use their fists and hand-held weapons for a rip-roaring knock-down drag-out brutal fight.

With its attractive production elements, the movie benefits from cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr.            ‘s framing of these newly constructed towns, showcasing the period production design by Martin Whist, with editing by Tom Eagles. The violence is graphic – a blown-off arm here, an exploding head there.

Amid the dusty outdoors and bullet-ripped clothes, Antoinette Messam’s costume design features a wide range of interesting vintage hats and lived-in frontier wear, with a few striking dusters and coats adding to the characters’ stature. You can always pick out Nat Love because of his jaunty red kerchief.

Not to be confused with a 1956 movie of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart, “The Harder They Fall” unfortunately lacks staying power because it preferred style over substance.

“The Harder They Fall” is a 2021 western directed by Jaymes Samuel and stars Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Zazie Beets, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo and Danielle Deadwyler. Rated R for strong violence and language, the run time is 2 hours and 16 minutes. In theaters Oct. 22 and streaming on Netflix on Nov. 3. Lynn’s Grade: C+