I Saw the TV Glow is a film that resists easy description. On its surface, it’s about two suburban teenagers in the late 1990s who bond over a TV show called “The Pink Opaque,” a Buffy-esque monster-of-the-week series that airs past one of their bedtimes. Owen is quiet, passive, suffocating under a father who won’t let him stay up late enough to watch. Maddy is older, more certain of herself, and obsessed with the show in a way that seems to go beyond normal fandom. When the show gets cancelled, Maddy disappears, and Owen’s life settles into a numbness that stretches across decades.
Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature arrived in May 2024 through A24 and immediately became one of the year’s most discussed films. Audiences were split between those who found it profoundly moving and those who found it frustratingly opaque. The film has been embraced as a landmark work by transgender audiences in particular, who see in it a powerful metaphor for the experience of living in denial of one’s own identity.
The Glow That Won’t Turn Off
The atmosphere is where Schoenbrun’s talent is most evident. Every frame of I Saw the TV Glow feels slightly wrong, in the best possible way. The suburban settings are too empty, the lighting too flat, the colors either washed out or saturated beyond reality. Ice cream parlors, school hallways, and living rooms take on the quality of spaces in a dream you’re trying to remember after waking. This isn’t accomplished through special effects or elaborate set design but through precise cinematography, sound design, and editing choices that create unease from ordinary places.
Justice Smith’s performance as Owen is remarkable for how much it communicates through restraint. Owen barely speaks above a murmur. He moves through life like someone waiting for permission to exist. Smith plays this not as simple shyness but as a profound disconnection from his own body and circumstances, a person watching his own life happen from the outside. As Owen ages (the film spans from his teenage years into middle age), the weight of that disconnection becomes almost unbearable to watch, not because of dramatic outbursts but because of their absence.
Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Maddy operates as Owen’s opposite and catalyst. Where he’s paralyzed, she acts. Where he accepts, she refuses. Their chemistry isn’t romantic but something more essential, the recognition between two people who see the same uncomfortable truth. Lundy-Paine brings an intensity that borders on mania, and the contrast between their energy and Smith’s stillness creates a dynamic that carries the film through its quieter stretches.
The integration of “The Pink Opaque” as a show-within-the-film is handled brilliantly. The fake TV show looks like a real late-90s supernatural drama, complete with cheap effects, earnest dialogue, and a visual style that evokes Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” The show isn’t played for irony. Schoenbrun treats it with the seriousness that media holds for the people who need it most, and the way Owen clings to it as a lifeline gives the film its emotional foundation.
The sound design deserves particular attention. Music from Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Polachek, and others is woven into the film not as soundtrack but as emotional atmosphere. Songs arrive at moments of peak feeling and transform scenes in ways that dialogue couldn’t.
The Flicker and the Static
Pacing is the primary barrier to entry. I Saw the TV Glow moves at its own speed, which is slow by most standards. Scenes linger, conversations trail off, and long stretches pass without traditional narrative momentum. The film asks you to sit with Owen’s inertia, and that inertia is the point, but it also means long passages where very little happens on screen. Viewers who need plot movement to stay engaged will struggle, particularly in the middle third.
The film’s relationship with clarity is complicated. Schoenbrun deliberately withholds explanation, leaving the central metaphor open enough for multiple readings. Some viewers have embraced that openness, finding personal meaning in the gaps. Others have felt that the film’s ambiguity crosses into vagueness, that it gestures toward profundity without committing to specific meaning. The line between evocative and evasive is thin, and individual viewers will land on different sides of it.
The horror elements are atmospheric rather than visceral. If you come to this expecting scares, you’ll be disappointed. The dread is existential, the kind of quiet terror that comes from recognizing yourself in Owen’s passivity. That’s a powerful form of horror for the right audience, but it’s a far cry from what the genre label typically promises, and the PG-13 rating reflects that restraint.
Some viewers have noted that the film’s emotional impact depends heavily on whether you connect with its central metaphor. For those who do, it’s devastating. For those who don’t, the slow pace and elliptical structure offer little else to hold onto. It’s a film that works entirely or not at all, with very little middle ground.
A Screen Between You and Your Life
I Saw the TV Glow’s power comes from a specific, painful idea: that it’s possible to spend an entire life knowing you’re not living the one you should be, and to be too afraid to do anything about it. Owen’s attachment to “The Pink Opaque” isn’t just nostalgia or escapism. The show represents a version of reality where he could be himself, and its cancellation mirrors the closing of a door he was too young and too scared to walk through.
That idea, of media as a mirror for an identity you can’t yet name, gives the film its emotional core. Schoenbrun isn’t making a film about a TV show. They’re making a film about the cost of self-denial, told through the language of television, fandom, and suburban American life.
Should You Watch I Saw the TV Glow?
If you connected with Mulholland Drive, Under the Skin, or Schoenbrun’s own We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, this operates in similar territory with a more focused emotional agenda. It’s essential viewing for anyone interested in how film can explore identity and belonging through genre frameworks. Skip it if you need your horror to be visceral, your narratives to be linear, or your metaphors to be clearly stated. This is a film that asks you to bring something of yourself to it, and the experience is shaped entirely by what you carry in.
The Verdict on I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow is the rare film that feels completely new, a work that uses the familiar language of suburban horror and 90s nostalgia to say something that hasn’t been said this way before. Schoenbrun’s direction creates an atmosphere of dread that’s impossible to separate from the sadness underneath it, and the performances from Smith and Lundy-Paine give that atmosphere human weight. It’s not for everyone, and it knows it. But for the audience it’s made for, it arrives with the force of recognition, the particular devastation of seeing your own unlived life reflected on screen. That’s something most films never attempt, let alone achieve.