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.