Sundance: ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Is a Haunting Neon Masterpiece

PARK CITY, Utah—Before I Saw the TV Glow even stages its neon-soaked opening shot of a somehow sinister-looking ice cream truck, director Jane Schoenbrun dares viewers to start asking questions. Is the film’s title a declaration—the voice of a character who’s witnessed something unnatural and wants to share it with us? Or is it perhaps a threatening patriarchal scold that people of a certain age, who grew up surreptitiously watching inappropriate things at inappropriate hours on tube TV’s, might instantly recognize?

Given what follows in Schoenbrun’s trippy, terrifying sophomore feature, the answer is probably “both.” I Saw the TV Glow, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, follows a timid teen named Owen (Justice Smith) who seems to move through life with a strange kind of stiffness, an unnameable fear that only seems to lift when he’s around Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine)—a disaffected grunge girl two years his senior who introduces him to a youth television series called The Pink Opaque. Although the series airs on a young adult entertainment network (the last program in the nightly line-up before the black-and-white reruns “for old people”), Maddy insists that it is too scary and too complicated for actual kids. There’s something deeper at play in this show, which hypnotizes both Maddy and Owen into full-blown obsession.

But is it the actual content of The Pink Opaque that glamours these unhappy teens, or is it something else?

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