Film Review

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) — groundbreaking, nostalgic, nightmarishly cathartic trans art

Two teenagers bond over their love of a supernatural TV show, before it is mysteriously cancelled.

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is, with absolutely zero hyperbole, a generation-defining maverick achievement. Even for a filmmaker who’s briskly exploded onto the scene as one of the most exciting emerging voices in modern American cinema, I Saw the TV Glow is a breathtakingly stark evolution of Schoenbrun’s style and an eviscerating rupture to the industry’s established norms. In a cinematic landscape dominated by cisnormative tales and aesthetics, Schoenbrun’s filmography — from the Slenderman-fandom documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018) to the screen-tale urban legend which is We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) — is a sincere breath of fresh air, honing in on the overstimulating anxieties of the current generation’s queerness and place in the modern era.

In two feature films alone, Schoenbrun’s examinations of how media shapes and redefines us have been swiftly established as at once distinctly harrowing and melancholic. From a clinical examination of the cult communities surrounding Slenderman to the “World’s Fair” roleplaying game that ambiguously alters its participants, the power of these films is distinct, subtly residing in their reframing of a cerebral alteration to our minds into something disturbingly physical and tangible. That said, the physicality of such a change is also uniquely queer in a way that gets elucidated textually and subtextually. The foundation here is inextricable; it’s just as important to examine the surface of Schoenbrun’s films as well as the trans narrative that resides underneath. As a trans-non-binary filmmaker, Schoenbrun’s eye for the symbolic vernacular of dysphoria and gender transition is so potent that it’s genuinely disruptive for a filmmaker dealing so heavily with such themes to become so close to the mainstream.