There is still time

Robin Koenig reviews I saw the TV glow

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and starring Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine, I Saw the TV Glow does not, at first glance, feel like a horror movie. There are no jump-scares, no bloody gore, no pumping adrenaline. However, it is shot through with as much dread as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and has an ending more viscerally upsetting than most films I’ve seen.

The basic plot of the film is that Owen (Smith), a young person growing up in 1990s suburban America, forms a relationship with fellow outcast Maddy (Lundy-Paine) over a shared love of “The Pink Opaque”, a sort of monster of the week Buffy-type show. Owen is detached and dissociated (especially as they enter puberty). Maddy is intense, awkward and angry, struggling to keep friends due to their open lesbianism as much as their general strangeness. Owen doesn't know (or doesn't want to know) if they like men or women, but they do know that they “like TV shows.”

Smith’s performance as Owen is distant, uncertain and uncomfortable. Their voice is flat. He ably portrays, as a cis man, the feelings of disassociation that many Trans people feel. Because, at its heart, I Saw the TV Glow is, unambiguously, a film about the Trans experience. This would still be obvious (the film has many strengths, subtlety is not one of them) if the director had not outright stated the fact.

It is from the trans experience that the movie mines its horror. The horror of being stuck in a body, a life, that's killing you, and feeling like there is no escape. As the film goes on, Maddy’s obsession with the Pink Opaque grows, and she begins to see it as more real than the reality that she currently lives in. Owen however, shrinks back, drawn by the chance of escape that Maddy offers, but also afraid, frozen by fear born from the society in which they live.

The nuclear family, the working life, and the patriarchal role of the father figure (Owen's father is played, in a brilliant casting choice, by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst) are all near insurmountable, oppressive obstacles to Owen and their chance of salvation. Owen's mother (a small but meaningful role, well acted by Danielle Deadwyler) is one of the few sympathetic characters outside the main two, but she is at a loss as to how to help her child and is caught in the shadow of her husband.

You could read the cause of Owen's hesitation and heart-rending self-denial as due, in part, to the constricting influence of the bourgeois family, and the broader social context. “This isn't the Midnight realm Maddy, it's just the suburbs”.

Along with the performances and script, other aspects of the film are also extremely strong. The cinematography is excellent, and the use of lighting (from purple neons to nostalgic sunsets to the titular “TV Glow”) is particularly striking. A haunting score by Alex G, interspersed with songs from the likes of Caroline Polachek and Phoebe Bridgers provides an appropriate backing track.

The film builds a sense of dread, until finally reaching a climax so suffocating, so heartbreaking, and so relatable that I’m not afraid to say that I broke down sobbing in the cinema where I saw this movie first. Interspaced throughout the movie is the sentence “there is still time”, scrawled in neon chalk marks. And that is indeed one of the messages of the film, there is always still time.

But there is another message, the message that there are forces (the family, the state, the economic system) that will work to keep you buried, to keep you in a place that is killing you. As puberty blocker bans suffocate trans youth, as years-long waiting lists and gatekeeping health systems leave trans people feeling like they are screaming for help with nobody listening, we need to remember that yes, there is still time. But we will have to fight for it.