I Saw The TV Glow - Film Review - Fremantle Shipping News

I was fortunate enough to attend the advance screening launch of I Saw the TV Glow, as a guest of Luna Cinemas, at Luna Leederville on Friday 16 August.

This stunning A24 film directed by Jane Schoenbrun and produced by actress Emma Stone alongside her husband comedian / writer Dave McCary feels like an Indie budget film sliced with the Netflix-era beautifully neon, high-definition bingeable thrillers we’ve all watched as guilty pleasures over the last five years.

I Saw the TV Glow follows the perspective of a young man, Owen, played by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith as he grows up.

Owen is an individual who is thoroughly uncomfortable in his own skin. He zombie-shuffles hesitantly through his own life, nonchalantly observing its goings on but never affecting it. His caring mother offers him little protection from his aggressive, distant father, and everything that’s implied from their tense, affectionless interactions. He finds a kindred spirit in Maddy, played by Brigette Lundy-Paine, a reclusive girl obsessed with a young adult fantasy tv show called “The Pink Opaque”.

Owen and Maddy are beguiled by the show where every week two teenage women combat monsters and a malicious lunar foe known as “Mr Melancholy”. The special effects and cheesy, wooden dialogue of the show brought out plenty of laughter from the Luna audience but our protagonists watch on in rapt attention.

Any fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Supernatural, or the like, will instantly feel a kinship with our young, troubled, slack-jawed tv observers. Especially in their efforts to escape an undeniably bleak yet mundane life. “Sometimes the Pink Opaque feels more real than real life”, Maddy confesses to Owen.

Who can’t relate to that from time to time? The structure, predictable character growth, and closure of tv shows is reassuring, or at least familiar. I felt a fair bit of this during my own Twin Peaks deep dive. On that note, this is definitely one for Lynch fans, also reminiscent of The Truman Show.

Themes running through the film include gender fluidity that feels authentic, the feeling of time dilation as you age and experience repetition in life, a sense of powerlessness, and the desire to escape. The tv is their only comfort.

Plenty of amusing deadpan quips, including “It’s not the Midnight Realm, it’s just the suburbs”. Maddie delivers her lines exceptionally well, Owen seems less convincing but that could be attributed to how inauthentic he feels in himself as a person and a man. He feels pressured to pretend to conform, especially by his father. “I love them more than anything”, as he grasps the fresh packaging of an LG tv box, while allegedly referring to his own family.

I Saw the TV Glow bears a gradual air of unease and nostalgia. This reinforces itself through expansive empty, heavily colour-saturated liminal spaces, a popular trope in thriller and horror films popularised by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey that’s seen an enthusiastic resurgence lately. Perhaps done to excess in this film. There’s even lengthy new-age punk rock band interludes in case you were in any danger of forgetting what era this film is set in.
This is described as a “horror drama” but the horror is much more subtle than anticipated. The real fear stems from the thought of being trapped in a life, or a body, that wrong yet having no courage to change the course of it. There’s also wistfulness in revisiting childhood memories that turn out to be cheaper than how you remembered.

Despite aspects of this film landing flat for me, I’m already looking forward to watching it again to see what I might have missed.

Rating – 6.5/10

Exclusive Season starts: 29 August, at Luna Leederville

* By Gayle O’Leary

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