In I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024), two teens form an unlikely kinship over their shared love of a dark late-night TV show, which offers them a dangerous but vivid reality more appealing than their own. As Maddy goes all the way, Owen is forced to choose the life he’ll live along with its regrets. This movie is weird, strangely hypnotic, and so ambiguous as to be frustrating. Overall, I’m glad I watched it, though I’m still not sure even now what I watched.
Owen (Justice Smith, whom I enjoyed in THE GET DOWN) is a young teen who ends up forming a bond with older teenager Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a teen horror show called THE PINK OPAQUE, about two girls who discover they have powers enabling them to resist Mr. Melancholy, who wants to draw them into a dark midnight realm to drain their essence. Both are not satisfied with their lives. Owen is confused and possibly impaired by a brain development issue; Maddy suffers loneliness and abuse and desperately craves escape. As they get older and increasingly obsessed with the show, which somehow feels more real to them than their own confining lives, they must ultimately make a choice whether to truly accept the world of THE PINK OPAQUE as reality or accept the world they live in as it is and make the best of it.
The movie is kind of slow, the dialogue awkward, the acting fairly monotone, and yet it strangely works. I was oddly mesmerized by it, enjoying it purely for being confidently weird, and I was definitely curious about where it was all going. Thematically, the movie appears to be about identity and how we project ourselves into what we see on screens. Where it’s all going is so ambiguous, with what we’re given being kind of a downer, that the sum is more frustrating than its individual parts. This was a case of a movie where ambiguity goes way beyond intention, particularly in whether THE PINK OPAQUE as real or fantasy and what it meant either way.
Overall, I liked I SAW THE TV GLOW. I didn’t love it, but it’s weird and different, and there’s definitely something there, even if the landing didn’t quite work for me.
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