There are certain films that feel like you’re watching the greatest movie ever. The feeling is physical; it’s pinpricks dancing on your skin. It’s your breath running jagged. Like free falling in love on a first date. It’s your spirit transcending a plane of existence for two hours, while all your problems just melt into the static. The ephemeral feeling of your loneliness and despair at the world fading away, right as hope for cinema takes its loving hand and caresses your cheek.
You know the feeling, and you know those films. You get it when watching ‘As Time Goes By’ in Casablanca. When Jesse and Celine narrowly avoid eye contact in the music booth in Before Sunrise, or when Andy Dufresne gets his metaphorical baptism as he escapes a river of shit in The Shawshank Redemption. I got this feeling when I was watching Jane Schoenbrun’s alchemic and unique film I Saw The TV Glow. Specifically when the vivid hellscape that Schoenbrun and team created came to its pessimistic soul-shaking climax and my entire body shook, the dense work of audacious queer art finding itself repeating across my eyeballs. The kind of film that makes you question if five stars is ever enough for something that is unquantifiable and incomparable. The kind to give you an existential crisis if everything else you’ve ever given five stars to is deserving of being placed on the same pedestal.
It must be stressed that going into I Saw The TV Glow as blind as possible will result in your best experience. Even knowing the textual reference that Shoenbrun uses as a way of discussing an entire subculture’s queerness and that parabolic sense of naivety that came from it will take away an element of the film that is a mischievous delight. With that, if you’re here to be sold on the film take this: Whatever film you’re expecting from I Saw The TV Glow is not what you’re going to get as the film perforates the membranes of genre; exciting, petrifying and astutely observes the flaws in nostalgia and the experience of dysphoria in horrifying and compelling fashion. Schoenbrun’s film is enigmatic, tangibly thought out and the kind of film that gazes into the deep recesses of your spirit.
This review was posted on March 4th 2024. Full review linked below.
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