Critics reviews

The trick, and the thing to be truly gracious to Schoenbrun and their collaborators for, is that all these entities and feelings occupy the same frame. Here is the great trans film, as like all the ones before it and the ones not made yet. Here is the great suburbs film. Here is the nostalgia and the ache and the warning away from these fonts.

The amount of thought put into the mechanics of a fictional show within the film’s metaphor is laudable, but by neither tipping into further esoterica or actively indulging the plot mechanics of the shows it pastiches, the story is paralyzed by its lack of commitment to anything more than its premise.

“I Saw the TV Glow” is a rare and magical film. It is a passionate, terrifying, physical manifestation of a movie. It reaches inside your imagination and stirs it around, making new connections between familiar concepts. It’s not just great, it’s fascinating and revelatory. The only rational response to a movie like this is to make a huge fuss about it. They come along so rarely.

I was bothered by a couple of moments where the movie felt a bit underwritten, almost improvisational, with dreamlike sequences that were more about vibes than lucid storytelling, but the way the film builds and works on your nerves is something... You leave TV Glow wanting to see it again.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

This time, Schoenbrun gets more personal, and more primally haunting. I Saw The TV Glow is a remarkable portrait of pop-culture obsession—how it can unite us, change us, and ripple down through our entire lives in ways both uplifting and unsettling.

It’s a paradox, perhaps, to conceive of materiality as oneiric and of fiction as political, but what a film like I Saw the TV Glow can show us, is that the only time machine for feelings we can hope for is cinema, as sensual and as fiercely beautiful as this.

Schoenbrun moves forward by looking back at the ’90s in their sophomore effort, I Saw the TV Glow, a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization through identification with a beguiling television program.

Schoenbrun is a leading voice in trans cinema, and in Owen the film seems to dramatise a state of not-becoming, through rough textures, colours that are by turns gloomy and vivid, and stunning music performances at a club that express the strong emotions held inside.

It's a film that lives and breathes through its images and sounds, which come crashing together to create an ethereal collage of feeling cut off from the world, and dissociated from one's own self — physically, mentally, spiritually — en route to some of the most rousing and disturbing emotional crescendos in recent memory.

I Saw The TV Glow wears its influences on its sleeve: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Secret World of Alex Mack, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete are among the shows that come to mind... At times, the film feels like a musical nightmare full of sadness and raw angst.

[I]n I Saw the TV Glow, a buzzy, brilliant new film... writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has made it all look so easy, crafting something loaded with meaning yet light on its feet, provoking us to discussion and debate while never feeling like an academic exercise – a movie that never forgets that it’s, well, a movie.