Review: 'I Saw the TV Glow' digs into childhood fears with an effective story of two teens obsessed with a supernatural television show
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun performs a clever and creepy magic trick in “I Saw the TV Glow”: She makes us completely unsettled by the smallest of details, by zeroing in on the most primal fears of childhood.
When we first meet Owen (Ian Foreman), he’s a lonely seventh-grader in 1996, living with his mom (Danielle Deadwyler, from “Till”) and stepdad (Fred Durst). At his school, he chats with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who’s reading a book that intrigues him, an episode guide for a TV show, “The Pink Opaque.”
Maddy explains the show’s premise — two teen girls (played in the show-within-a-show by Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) meet at sleepaway camp and discover they’re psychically linked, and in subsequent episodes they’re battling supernatural terrors from opposite sides of town — and Owen wants to watch, even though his parents don’t allow him to stay up that late on a Saturday. (It’s on at 10:30 p.m., just before the cable channel switches over to sitcom reruns.) So one night, Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s and watches his first episode. From then on, he’s hooked.
When Owen — played as an older teen by Justice Smith — can’t get over to Maddy’s, Maddy starts making him VHS tapes of the episodes. That stops when the show is abruptly canceled, and the same night, Maddy disappears mysteriously, leaving behind the burning embers of her TV set in the backyard.
Schoenbrun (who previously made the disturbing “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) taps into the tropes of late-‘90s teen-driven TV — there’s a hint of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” and at least one sly nod to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” — and the ominous ways they burrow into a young fan’s brains. They feel real, maybe more true-to-life in our memory than they really were, and call out to something in these viewers, Owen and Maddy, that’s missing in their solitary lives.
Smith (“The American Society of Magical Negroes”) is effectively unhinged as the older Owen, as he’s sucked into the world of the Pink Opaque and not sure where it ends and his world begins. Schoenbrun’s more impressive find, though, is Lundy-Paine, whose internalized fear augments and deepens the existential dread running through the movie.
One more thing about “I Saw the TV Glow” that adds to its doom-filled atmosphere is the soundtrack. The indie rocker Alex G creates several of the songs that play in the score — and there’s one scene in a club where we hear compelling stage performances by the bands Sloppy Jane (featuring Phoebe Bridgers) and King Woman. If teenage nightmares have a playlist, these songs are in heavy rotation.
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‘I Saw the TV Glow’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, May 17, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements and teen smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.