To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a webbrowser that supports HTML5video I Saw the TV Glow has proved itself an unexpected frontrunner among this year’s must-watch movies as it hits cinemas. The suburban horror flick, from trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, opens with a 12-year-old Owen (Justice Smith) whose life is turned upside down when his older teen friend Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) introduces him to a late-night supernatural TV show, The Pink Opaque. Each week on the show Isabel and Tara defeat a new enemy, and it quickly becomes an obsession for Owen and Maddy who are dealing with their own troubled family lives and existential crises.
The unsettling 90s era film – soundtracked by Florist, Caroline Polachek, Jay Som, Sloppy Jane – peels open the protagonists inner vulnerabilities as it progressively blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. It also features cameos from chart-topping artist Phoebe Bridgers and Buffy star Amber Benson and has been praised for its subversive and powerful allegory for the trans, and queer experience. As it stands, the one-hour 40 minute movie sits at an impressive 84% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes as the glowing reviews roll in ahead of the UK release.
‘That the film’s allegorical excavation of queer trauma is so precise and so acute marks Schoenbrun as a once-in-a-lifetime filmmaker, and I Saw The TV Glow as the best film of 2024, if not the decade,’ Movie Marker reflected in their fiv.