Some films, like some dreams, never really dissolve. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is one of them.
I Saw the TV Glow.A strange and low-frequency signal of a film, Schoenbrun’s 2024 opus flickers and loops in the mind long after the credits. What begins as a nostalgic coming-of-age tale, with a faint glow of teenage longing and ‘90s analogue charm, gradually mutates into something closer to a slow exorcism — a film less interested in telling a story than in evoking the texture of a private haunting.
The plot is simple: a boy meets a girl who shows him a television show that, over time, consumes his world. But in this recursive gesture lies the film’s most insistent inquiry: what happens when our inner lives are shaped more by media than by people, more by symbols than by speech? For Schoenbrun – whose work belongs to the increasingly rich tradition of queer auto-fiction rendered in digital and cinematic form – The Pink Opaque (the show within the film) is a metonym for the queer unconscious: televisual, displaced, coded, and fragmentary.
Set in a vaguely American suburb that owes more to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks than to any identifiable geography, I Saw the TV Glow introduces us to Owen, played with smouldering intensity by Justice Smith. Owen is quiet, withdrawn, suspended somewhere between childhood and adolescence, and rendered mute by an atmosphere of patriarchal repression. Enter Maddy (Jack Haven), a goth-punk teen whose DIY aesthetic masks a fiercely intelligent desperation. Maddy introduces Owen to The Pink Opaque, a surreal and pulpy series that resembles Buffy the Vampire Slayer if it were directed by Harmony Korine: teenage heroes, zombie antagonists, vague supernatural threats, and low-budget neon. It is not the plot that binds the two, though. Something about The Pink Opaque – its camp intensity, its coded metaphors, its refusal of realism – resonates with a part of themselves they cannot yet name.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
In many ways, this process of recognition – mediated, delayed, and fictional – is the heart of the film. For queer viewers of a certain generation, especially those who came of age in the wilderness of dial-up internet and late-night cable, this dynamic is painfully familiar. Identity wasn’t named or asserted, but intuited – glimpsed in a minor character’s eyes, in the friendship that was really a love story, in the way fantasy offered coherence when reality did not.
This is not a sentimental film. There is no redemption arc, no cathartic release; what Schoenbrun offers instead is a long, slow descent into dissociation. As the film progresses, time grows slippery, characters vanish or repeat, the colour palette turns phosphorescent. Owen becomes older, but no freer. The act of watching – the passivity, the yearning, the escape – becomes a form of psychic imprisonment. The Pink Opaque begins as refuge, then becomes obsession, then finally, echo. In one of the film’s more devastating moments, Owen says that the show “feels more real than real life.” It is a quiet admission of defeat.
The comparison to David Lynch is inevitable, but slightly misleading. Where Lynch’s surrealism often conceals a metaphysical anxiety, Schoenbrun’s is more psychodynamic: the horror here is interior. I Saw the TV Glow could be read as a study in gender dysphoria (Schoenbrun is themselves nonbinary), a meditation on derealisation, or simply a lament for the lives we perform when our real selves cannot yet speak. It has more in common with Maggie Nelson than with Ari Aster – a queer phenomenology rendered in VHS grain.
What makes the film so haunting is not what happens, but what remains repressed. Schoenbrun rejects the melodramatic tropes of queer cinema. There is no coming out, no romance, no martyrdom. Instead, we are left with absence, with estrangement, with the slow violence of not being seen. It is this refusal that gives the film its charge. By denying resolution, Schoenbrun allows the viewer to remain suspended – not just in the plot, but in the conditions that produce the need for such plots in the first place.
Justice Smith’s performance is remarkable for its stillness. It slow collapses inward, like a house abandoned by its occupants. Hardy, too, is revelatory: aggressive and luminous, a flickering presence whose own fate remains deliberately opaque. Together, they form something more than friendship, but less than romance. It’s a kinship forged in the space between worlds.
If I Saw the TV Glow has a broader concern, it is to insist on the legitimacy of these interior, fractured, non-linear experiences, especially for queer people whose sense of self is often formed in concealment and contradiction. That it does so not through argument, but through effect – through mood, colour, rhythm – is part of its achievement.
The film premiered at Sundance in early 2024, to a kind of hushed awe. Martin Scorsese, in a rare public endorsement, praised it as one of the most profound cinematic works of the year. One suspects it will acquire cult status over time, passed from viewer to viewer like a secret. There are more polished films. There are more coherent ones. But few recent works capture so precisely the sensation of watching oneself disappear — and the strange hope that flickers in the static.
I Saw the TV Glow premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and later screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale. Now it is on Netflix.
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