The frequency in the room shifted as we took communion with the image on the vinyl movie screen. Festival buzz energized the room, to be sure, but it was what happened in I Saw the TV Glow that brought us together. It is such a specific work of filmmaking, so intimately individual, a movie about identity and how we find it, that you begin to feel that anyone who has found or lost themselves in their passionate pursuit of movies will once again find and lose themselves in this movie. A generational statement of filmmaking ought to suggest a new lens for how we see the world. In I Saw the TV Glow, the end result is not just about the worldview of a generation, but how this generation sees themselves in that world. This is vital filmmaking charged to the umpteenth degree, our collective media dreams projected back to us, a dreamscape of our record of consumption. What we bring to I Saw the TV Glow is what we will see in it. This is your life: who will you become? How have you become who you are?

The room sat in silence first before it burst with applause. We saw the TV Glow and it was good. It was so fucking good. Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore film delivers fully on the check written by We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, only it has now been cashed for an exponentially higher amount. If you’ve ever been invested in any kind of media ephemera you’ll understand. If you’ve made it here, you’ve loved a cult movie or an old TV show that is canceled too soon — a work that feels suspended in time, locked into stasis like it’s held up by a cultural gravity well that you have to be pulled into yourself to fully understand. Outsiders, those being Normies, just wouldn’t get it, you have to be deeply entrenched in this piece of media to live it. Maybe someone else can just watch it, but for you, it’s become an object of affection, something that just by its inclusion in your life, suddenly also makes you feel more included, as though you are a part of something bigger than yourself.

Connective cinema is the most important kind of cinema that we can imagine. What better purpose could a movie serve than to connect all of us, to take all of our shared interests, and unify them as a bridge between what we love and how we show ourselves to the world? The way I Saw the TV Glow accomplishes this is by creating a liminal space between the world of its characters and the world of The Pink Opaque, which is anything you’ve ever loved so deeply that it’s become a part of you. Identity, gender, and sexuality are all uniquely expressed by the properties of this in-movie show, and each subject is explored with loving inclusion for whatever the audience’s The Pink Opaque may have been, whoever you are, no matter how you identify. You are invited into the warm embrace of this mercurial, glowing TV space, and will leave with something new you can believe about yourself. The best movies give you something to take with you and I Saw the TV Glow gives you every part of itself. It invites you to embrace it just as the characters inside it embrace The Pink Opaque. Let it matter to you and take it with you, be forever changed by it, if you dare to be.

Horror is the widest genre bucket. A horror movie can be anything and that’s what makes the genre especially good, inclusive, and forever popular and watchable. Horror is often just a motif onto which other genres are prescribed. Horror can be anything and it is not confined. I Saw the TV Glow understands the fluidity of the genre and how the expression of horror, as a thematic result of what a movie means to its audience, is where we can begin to identify how it operates as a genre movie. The horror of I Saw the TV Glow, like anything else we can say about it, is what we bring into it and what we walk away with. It’s a stirring invite to look at our own identity and the forces around how we became who we are and it accomplishes this with superlative direction, wherein every part of the movie operates as a cog in the overall design and it all turns together like a beautiful machine.

The fluidity of the filmmaking is the result of Jane Schoenbrun’s careful execution. Their primary actors, Justice Smith as Owen and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy have accomplished a bond and as it plays on the screen, you can imagine it’s at a deep soul level, or that the director is just brilliant enough to always convey that, as though you can visualize the physical wavelengths stretching between the characters. It’s astonishing to watch and creates this stunning dynamic wherein either character is either you or someone you know. Maybe you are the seeking party who meets this badass person who opens your worldview up completely by showing you what they care about most. Maybe you’re the amazing person responsible for broadening someone else’s boundaries and creating space for them to live their lives as their most authentic self. Probably you are both people and will find the interior lives within these performances so emotionally arresting that you cannot help but see the universality of these portrayals.

Deep aesthetic undercurrents run through I Saw the TV Glow. The title itself almost conjures what those are like. It’s sneaking into a friend’s place late at night and watching a forbidden program. Maybe you’re not allowed to watch it. Maybe you’re told it isn’t for your gender. Maybe it’s just something you do not want someone to walk in on you watching. This belongs to you. It becomes who you are, not in the sense that what we like shapes us, but in the sense that something inside us changes while watching the program. Haunting melodies are cast alongside these lost transmissions, themselves ephemeral, sounds of vapor lifting off a TV that emanates fields of energy back into your space. The score by Alex G and tracks by Caroline Polachek and a host of indie artists you should look into conjure visual shapes of the ’90s in their sounds, an electric and plugged-in noisescape that feels searching, communal, and like everyone belongs inside of it. This is a holistic and deeply meditative work about our consumption and the parasocial relationships we develop through the media, but it is not scornful of us for finding our belonging. The movie starts from a place of understanding and also ends there, a compassionate and empathetic work that is a warm digital hug, but just happens to be one that will shock you on contact.

Every part of I Saw the TV Glow is exactly in the right place. You cannot change anything without shifting the meaning. The movie is constructed out of a shared passion and empathy for how we connect to media. It understands that it might offer the same opportunity back to us. For many people, especially those interested in exploring their identities through the media they consume, this is a work to treasure and hold tight, because movies like this are rare. Jane Schoenbrun’s new movie is a generational signal of warmth and inclusion, utilizing the dark threads of horror storytelling to pull the audience in and make sure they know that they belong. The movie is doing for you exactly what the fictional space of The Pink Opaque is doing for its character. It’s asking you to join the program — if you ever cannot find yourself, come on in, the TV is glowing and tonight’s feature is just for you.

10/10