I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
The marketing for I Saw the TV Glow is doing nobody any favours. I came in braced for horror, primed for dread, and found something else entirely: a slow, melancholy, dreamlike film about identity and dissociation that uses the language of late-night television and adolescent longing to ask some genuinely heavy questions. Whether that sounds appealing or not, know this first: if you buy a ticket expecting to be frightened, you will spend the opening act simply recalibrating to the film you are actually watching. I know I did.
Jane Schoenbrun's feature follows two lonely teenagers who bond over a strange TV show that seems to bleed into their real lives in ways neither of them can quite articulate. That friendship becomes a vessel for bigger questions: about the selves we bury, about dissociation, about the particular grief of not knowing who you are or whether you ever will. Schoenbrun has spoken openly about drawing on their own experience of transitioning, and that personal charge is palpable throughout. The sincerity is not in question. The themes and the social commentary are thoughtful and genuinely meant, and I have absolutely no quarrel with any of that.
My trouble, and I want to tread carefully here because I can feel how much this film means to the people it is reaching for, is simply that the vessel carrying all of that meaning did not work for me.
Justice Smith, a long way from his days in Pokémon Detective Pikachu, is decent as the withdrawn Owen. There is something genuinely interesting in watching him play this particular register of quiet, hollow unease. But the performance as Maddy never quite convinced me, and crucially, the chemistry between the two central characters, which the whole film leans its weight on, just did not click. When a story is built around a bond that is supposed to feel formative and consuming, you need to believe in it completely. I never quite got there.
The pace is deliberate, and I do understand that the hazy, becalmed register is part of the design rather than a flaw. Schoenbrun wants you slightly unmoored, slightly unsure of what is real and what is bleed-through from the television world Owen and Maddy share. In theory, that is a compelling approach. In practice, it kept holding me at arm's length rather than pulling me closer. I kept waiting for the film to reach through the screen and grab me. It never did.
There is an audience for whom this will be something genuinely profound, and given what it is trying to do and who it is speaking to most directly, I would not dream of talking them out of that. Films like this earn their devotees honestly. I think of something like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which also centres on lonely teenagers finding each other and discovering themselves, and that one landed for me in the way this one did not. It is a reminder that subject matter and sincerity alone cannot do all the work.
I can only ever review the film I actually watched rather than the one I can see it was trying to be. And the film I watched was a sincere, personal, occasionally striking piece of work that, for all its evident heart and meaning, never found its way through to me. Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-08-15
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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