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…