I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 22, 2025

 

Anyone who’s ever gotten into a show or received a mixtape can find something in I Saw the TV Glow.

For half of the film, Owen and Maddy (Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine) are unlikely teenage friends bonding over a supernatural TV series called The Pink Opaque. Neither one fits in at their suburban high school; this one shared interest bonds them. That their interest features silly dancing baddies, fro-yo monsters, and pink glowing tattoos is beside the point. The show’s fictional midnight realm is their anchor to the real world.

The other half of the film challenges my adjective “real”. Is their show actually their past? Are Tara and Isabel characters on the Young Adult Network or proxies for Maddy and Owen? Who actually is Maddy and who actually is Owen? Years later, when the two reunite, fact and fiction blur into a surrealist slurry of neon pink nineties nostalgia and abject terror over what’s underneath each character’s surface.

Marketed by A24 as an intellectual horror film, I’m selling it to you as a mystery. After four watches and hours of discussion and rumination, that feels like the fairest pitch. I Saw the TV Glow is arthouse fare where the color of the giant tarp matters. This won’t be to every person’s tastes; for some, its cilantro will taste like black-light soaked soap.

But the mysteries in Jane Schoenbrun’s film beg to be unraveled. Viewers will hypothesize over the surface-level mysteries of what happened and what’s real, but the true mysteries are deeply personal. This is a film about transformation but also the tragedy of fearing transformation. At one point, Owen says “It feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides,” but that somber self-awareness isn’t authentic—he’s too afraid to look inside himself and discover he’s buried something his entire life. But what could it be?

If this all sounds a bit cryptic, that’s my presentation, not the movie’s. Even if you don’t recognize the tarp’s colors, the film wears its metaphors like a glowing pink tattoo. Characters tell you what’s really happening; they talk about TV shows and industrial freezer hearts, but that’s Schoenbrun varnishing the film with a popular media finish. Ultimately, this is a surrealist story about an old teen TV series, but it’s also a highly personal story about the treacherous veering path to self-acceptance some among us traverse.

I Saw the TV Glow probably isn’t a film to throw on while digesting turkey, but nobody wants or needs my help identifying crowd pleasers. This is a gorgeous, challenging film to inspire introspection and empathy. No film from 2024 has stuck with me more than this one.

No film from 2024 begs to be shared more, either.

 

Conclave (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 8, 2024

As the facilitator at Diamond Day, I need to believe that powerful, transformative change can happen in a singular confined space. I tell the participants that we want the day to feel like a day apart from school and the rest of their lives. I call it a bubble; what’s learned there leaves there, but what’s said there stays there.

 

Released two weeks ago, director Edward Berger’s Conclave traces its story around a similar principle. Substitute the generously-shared small gym for the musty annals of the Vatican and you have your tight quarters; instead of 140 students, staff, and alumni, drop in 110 Cardinals gathered together to vote for and elect a new Pope.

 

Like Diamond Day, Conclave is full of twists and turns. You can feel the foundation being laid for unexpected intrigue in both. At Diamond Day, it’s the interjected “If you really knew me” phrasings and the emotional hiccups that crop up out of nowhere. In Conclave, its the factions forming and whispered questions. Did the Pope fire him? Who appointed that Cardinal? Who paid for her flight? At Diamond Day, I as facilitator must stay ahead of the proceedings, anticipating needs and adjusting intended sequences; in Conclave, someone is always seemingly ahead, turning the crank, but it’s never clear who—and when it is, control lurches suddenly. The clergymen voting, squabbling, and backstabbing are nearly all old, wrinkled, and gray, but they connive like men half their ages.

 

Granted, that last bit severs the tenuous parallel I’ve cast between our wellness workshop and a film about church leaders grasping for power. Really, there’s no reason to connect the two at all: our tie-dyed shirt bears little resemblance to the cardinals’ cassocks, and our goal is empowerment for all rather than for elevating one purportedly “reluctant” man to the papacy. They’re fundamentally different.

 

Except for one thing. When students attend Diamond Day for the first time, they often have no idea what’s coming. One student last year confessed to thinking it was all-day homework help; another was certain we’d be playing soccer. When they sit down in their folding chairs, they have no idea what they’re about to see, hear, or feel.

 

That part resembles Conclave. I watch a lot of movies, and I think a lot about story structure; I relish anticipating the progression of any film, show, or novel I jump into. During the second half of Conclave, you can feel the thing building to something as Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and the rest of the cast ratchet up their frustration and paranoia—but you can’t tell when or how the shoe will drop. The story keyed me up as much as any action movie despite the screen being dense with creaky-kneed elder statesmen in cumbersome garb. I expected light intrigue and some behind-the-hymns glimpses of the Vatican in a stodgy drama, but I watched a pulpy thriller on-screen.

 

Conclave won’t be for everyone, especially with the way the story uses real issues affecting real people as glorified props for its characters’ posturing, and some will prefer the globe-trotting rush of The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons over the claustrophobia of Berger’s film. But I had a great time learning about this world and its players. Watching them tear one another down in the name of the Church entertained me.

 

Again, that’s very different from Diamond Day, but still: while the workshop scratches an emotional itch, Conclave aims for the entertainment spot.

 

And delivers.