I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Jane Schoenbrun's second feature follows Owen across two decades of suburban New Jersey, from a lonely adolescence spent sneaking tapes of a canceled young-adult show to a middle age spent apologizing to children at a birthday party. The Pink Opaque, the show within the film, is a Buffy-shaped vessel for psychic teenagers and a villain named Mr. Melancholy, and it serves as the surface onto which the film's real subject is projected. That subject is the egg crack, the moment a trans person recognizes that the shape of their own life does not fit. Schoenbrun works in allegory and atmosphere, declining to stage a coming-out scene, which lends the whole enterprise a humming dread that a more literal treatment could not sustain.

Justice Smith anchors the film as a Black lead whose race the screenplay never raises as a subject, and Jack Haven matches him as Maddy, the friend who buries herself and returns claiming to be someone else. The supporting cast draws from a wide pool, including Danielle Deadwyler, trans and nonbinary performers, and a parade of musicians. The show within the show gives us two psychic heroines and a monster-of-the-week rhythm inherited from the nineties, though the film's interests sit with identity and repression, not with a program for gender politics. Suburbia here is a soft prison of arcades and VHS tapes, and the critique of consumer escapism never hardens into an economic argument.

The omissions are as telling as the inclusions. There is no environmental sermon, no historical revisionism, no body positivity despite the body horror, no neurodivergence as a stated theme. The film lectures almost not at all, trusting the image of a man cutting open his own chest to find a television glowing inside. It is a serious work, and it is not confused about what it is.