NZIFF: I Saw the TV Glow

Gunge, goons, and girls with unbreakable psychic bonds are your new late-night obsession in this unsettling fable about what happens when you get offered a chance at a fantasy, but choose to settle for reality.

It’s 1998. Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) are two awkward, lonely teenagers, stuck somewhere in smalltown America. In a time before the internet, their escape is the alluring weirdness of late-night television. One show in particular draws them together – The Pink Opaque. Think Buffy meets Power Rangers. But after Maddy mysteriously disappears, the line between TV and reality starts to blur, leaving Owen alone to navigate a grotesque nightmare world of memory, monsters, and regret.

Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an intimate, slow-burning horror about loneliness and isolation online. With a bigger budget and a more confident hand, I Saw the TV Glow is a revelatory expansion on that debut, using alienation and media obsession as the springboard to tell a heartbreaking parable about self-denial, and – in carefully surfaced subtext – about transness and the suffocating horror of the closet.

With a soundtrack by indie darling Alex G (and contributions from the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek), stunning use of colour and light, and some truly astonishing 1990s-style prosthetic make-up, I Saw the TV Glow is the rare surreal freak-out with real heart and real pain. — Amelia Berry