By Nicole Veneto

I Saw the TV Glow is nothing short of astonishing, a defining moment in queer cinema in the making and proof positive that Jane Schoenbrun is one of our generation’s most needed filmmakers.

I Saw the TV Glow, screened as part of Independent Film Festival Boston, opens May 8 at Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport and May 10 at Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) basking in The Pink Opaque in I Saw the TV Glow. Photo: A24

We were still very much in lockdown when I watched We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as part of IFF Boston’s digitized 2021 festival. This turned out to be the ideal viewing experience for Jane Schoenbrun’s stunning feature debut, which follows a teenage girl descending down a dysphoric internet rabbit hole while playing a horror MMORPG. Though World’s Fair was a sleeper hit with its intended queer/trans audience, many (straight, cis) people bounced off this deeply unconventional movie because it wasn’t “scary” the way it had been sold as (I still stand by my Videodrome comparison). Now, backed with a bigger budget and A24’s prestige branding, Schoenbrun’s second feature I Saw the TV Glow is the lo-fi horror film most probably expected out of World’s Fair. And good god, is it a gut punch.

There’s actually so much I want to say about I Saw the TV Glow that it’s almost overwhelming to put my thoughts in order. This is perhaps the highest of praises I can give any movie; it is the mark of a modern masterpiece from a director I can now confidently call one of the most important to emerge in the 21st century. This film might very well save people, and I don’t say that lightly. In a year that’s delivered some of the best queer cinema has had to offer, I Saw the TV Glow emerges as a neon-soaked beacon of hope and despair, at once beautiful, sad, terrifying, and immensely empathetic.

On election night 1996, overprotected seventh grader Owen (Ian Foreman) meets Maddy (Atypical’s Brigette Lundy-Paine, who eventually delivers the year’s most eviscerating monologue) with her head buried in the official episode guide to The Pink Opaque, a Buffy-meets-Goosebumps style series about two psychic teens (Madeline’s Madeline star Helena Howard and musician Lindsay Jordan a.k.a. Snail Mail) battling Monsters of the Week on The Young Adult Network. The two outcasts strike up an uneasy friendship around the series. Owen becomes transfixed with it after catching commercials while channel surfing. Cut to two years later and Owen (played with incredible heartache by Justice Smith, an actor who’s clearly been wasted in the pits of IP franchise slop if this is what he’s capable of) is a reserved high schooler watching VHS copies of episodes Maddy, now an out lesbian, leaves for him in the school’s dark room. (As for Owen’s sexuality, well, just thinking about that stuff “feel[s] like someone took a shovel and dug out my insides.”) The two hatch a plan to run away from their hometown but, when The Pink Opaque is suddenly canceled, Maddy vanishes off the face of the earth. As Owen grows into his twenties slowly succumbing to small town malaise, Maddy reappears, claiming to have been inside The Pink Opaque and that it’s starting to bleed into their reality.

Something Schoenbrun understands on an intimate level —  and which I haven’t seen any queer film incorporate as an integral part of LGBTQ experience — is that fandom and our teenage obsessions are often conduits for queerness and community. Between Maddy’s gender troubles and Owen’s suffocating homelife (should note here that his overbearing father is played by none other than Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst), The Pink Opaque gives them a language and a template they can model their own desired lives after. Though the pair belong to a slightly older age bracket than myself (I do have vivid early memories of peak Nickelodeon programming), their infatuation with The Pink Opaque is one I immediately recognized and identified with, having spent much of my own adolescence on Tumblr enmeshed with anime fans reblogging Evangelion memes and breaking down esoteric show lore. To them, The Pink Opaque is a communal lifeline, a salve to make suburban loneliness and dysphoria a little less painful. As Maddy tells Owen while he’s trying to fall asleep on her basement floor, “Sometimes, The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life.”

Schoenbrun absolutely nails the hazy, lo-fi aesthetic of ’90s SNICK programming, imbuing it with a sinister, half-remembered ambience that’s characteristic of analog horror trends. Yet the strongest influence on I Saw the TV Glow is by far David Lynch’s own foray into the television format, Twin Peaks. For all its stylistic indulgence in the nostalgic Nickelodeon ’90s, Schoenbrun never loses sight of the dead-end escapism of nostalgia. Comforting as the past can be, fatalism is sure to follow a retreat into fantasy is a means to avoid confronting the reality of who and what we are in the real world. And as Lynch warned in The Return (to which this film, alongside Bertrand Bonello’s excellent The Beast, owe much to), you can’t ever go home again. As TV closes in on its final moments, Schoenbrun’s queering of Lynch’s suburban nightmare takes a staggeringly metatextual quality, equal parts season 2’s “How’s Annie?” cliffhanger and The Return’s final scream into the existential void.

I Saw the TV Glow gutted me in a way few things have, leaving me a shattered mess in its aftermath. I even burst into tears when I made breakfast the following morning; and my throat was still clenching up during the commute to work. But I can only imagine the response the film will elicit from people like Owen, for whom Jane personally intervenes in the midst of all the chaos to signal “THERE IS STILL TIME.” It is never too late to transition, to come out, to accept the person inside that you believe is buried too deep to excavate. To quote Esther Rosenfield (a podcast guest of mine, and one of the film’s earliest champions) in her Sundance review, “[I Saw The TV Glow’s] bombastic depiction of the emotional distress which can accompany transgender life is among the most potent in cinema.” I Saw the TV Glow is nothing short of astonishing, a defining moment in queer cinema in the making — proof positive that Schoenbrun is one of our generation’s most needed filmmakers.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.