I Saw the TV Glow is a heartbreaking nightmare for the rerun generation

• I Saw the TV Glow
• Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
• Starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine and Danielle Deadwyler
• Classification 14A; 100 minutes
• Opens in theatres May 17

Critic’s Pick

Next week, David Cronenberg will premiere his latest production, The Shrouds, at the Cannes Film Festival. But starting this Friday, adventurous Canadian moviegoers can discover the mesmerizing work of Cronenberg’s most exciting disciple (who is not already flesh-and-blood related to David) when Jane Schoenbrun debuts their remarkable new coming-of-age horror film, I Saw the TV Glow.

A haunting, evocative, and heartbreaking exploration of the adolescent pains that come with figuring out just who you are and who you cannot be, Schoenbrun’s film fuses the body-horror of Cronenberg’s sticky oeuvre (notably 1983′s Videodrome) with the rerun-addled memories of a tween who has watched far too much television under far too loose parental supervision. It is at once a singular piece of pop-cult art, delivered with the brash confidence of a filmmaker who has either been told “no” too many times or not enough, and a film that could not exist without the contributions of Cronenberg and a dozen of his contemporaries and acolytes (including Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly), their midnight visions co-opted by Schoenbrun into one slickly nostalgic neon-lit nightmare.

Opening in 1996, the film follows a lonely Grade 7 student named Owen (Ian Foreman) as he stubbornly clings to the background of his drab suburban existence. Owen’s mother (Danielle Deadwyler) is terminally sick, his stepfather (an unrecognizable Fred Durst, of Limp Bizkit fame) is a dismissive brute, and he doesn’t seem to have a friend in the world. That is until he strikes up a quiet bond with a Grade 9 student named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who introduces Owen to a television series called The Pink Opaque.

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Aimed at tweens who presumably have bedtimes but airing only on Fridays at 10:30 p.m., The Pink Opaque is a squishy blend of such young-adult catnip as Are You Afraid of the Dark?, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Focusing on two teen girls who fight grotesque monsters – such as an ice-cream creature that oozes blood in place of strawberry syrup and a “big bad” villain named Mr. Melancholy whose crater-pocked face resembles the sinister visage of the moon in Georges Méliès’s essential 1902 cinematic artifact A Trip to the Moon – the series is a mythology-dense epic filled with ambitious allusions and dangerous rabbit holes. A perfect world, in other words, for young people looking to either find or lose themselves inside.

After watching his first episode of The Pink Opaque during a clandestine sleepover at Maddy’s house, Owen’s life is forever altered in ways that he cannot, and may not ever be able to, explain. Time begins to warp, and reality bends. Maddy disappears from her home at the same time that The Pink Opaque airs its series finale, a deeply disturbing cliffhanger that takes the Corinthians maxim of putting childish things away to extremes. What little control Owen had over his life spirals, to the point that his own physical growth escapes him. (There is a reason that Schoenbrun has the 28-year-old actor Justice Smith play Owen once the character starts the ninth grade.) And then the pair’s anonymous suburban town begins to reveal new and startling layers of itself, including a roadhouse that is pure Twin Peaks.

Audiences don’t need to know Schoenbrun’s own personal history to understand what the trans filmmaker, who uses non-binary pronouns, is aiming to explore with Owen’s journey – that overwhelming discomfort that some of us feel with the bodies we are born into, and the tragic pains of finding a path forward.

But while I Saw the TV Glow lands as an essential entry into the burgeoning canon of trans cinema – it is simply coincidence that the movie arrives in theatres the same month as Vera Drew’s similarly minded but tonally opposite comedy The People’s Joker – there is so much more to Schoenbrun’s world. Like their first film, 2021′s internet-spiked horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow is a film of mirrors and trap doors. It is just as much about identity as it is obsession.

Anyone who has pored over online message boards looking for hidden clues in episodes of The X-Files or Lost can relate to Owen as he struggles to find the border between where his world stops and where the realm of The Pink Opaque begins. And Schoenbrun comes to the material honestly – the filmmaker has a clear love for a particularly strange and ambitious era of the small screen, going as far to cast key Buffy alum Amber Benson in a small but pivotal role.

By the end of the film, which is capped by an eye-popping, ear-splitting, and gut-busting scene in which Smith unleashes a tortured performance for the ages – Schoenbrun seems ready to snatch the spiked crown from David Cronenberg’s head. While it will take more than two features to claim such a cinematic monarchy, the throne is certainly in their sight. As Canada’s reigning film king would say, long live the new flesh.