Starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine 

Written and Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

A24, in cinemas now.

 

In the 1996, an isolated 12-year-old boy becomes obsessed with an obscure late night TV show through which he develops an intense friendship with an older girl.

Somewhere in the genesis of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow was a half decent idea, rooted in the desperate obsessions of adolescence. Hormones are off the scale; it’s all too common to feel like an uncomfortable, unwanted outsider; and many an alienated teen has sought solace by grabbing for the emotional lifebelt of the nearest indie rock star or cult TV show that seems to tell the unhappy story they are sure is unique to them. But what happens when that intense teenage need starts to blur the boundary between fantasy and reality? This is the challenge facing Owen, played with monotone vulnerability by Justice Smith (and Ian Foreman as his younger self).

I was definitely up for this. The way TV drama inhabits the audience’s consciousness is meat and drink to someone who has been making their living from screen storytelling for the best part of three decades.

Sadly, I Saw the TV Glow is a crushing disappointment. To be fair, I am congenitally allergic to indie mumbling at the best of times, but when the mumbling is largely in the form of extended monologues, suggestive of far more interesting things happening elsewhere, I think there is an objective argument to be made that the movie has failed in its fundamental cinematic mission to show, not tell.

It’s hard to find anything to commend in the script, which ambles aimlessly through several decades with no actual story. If Owen was going on a journey, it wasn’t one for which I could divine any particular route plan. Events follow one another in a seemingly random fashion, stopping off for a bit of punky grunge here; dropping into a bit of David Cronenberg body horror there; nodding coyly to a moment of trans ambiguity; but mainly exuding all the panache of an extremely bad 1980s student film shot on used VHS tapes, by the sort of stoned movie buff who tells you earnestly: ‘But it doesn’t have to make sense!’

Grrrr.

Verdict: If I hadn’t been reviewing it, I doubt I would have stayed to the end, but for my sins I watched every tedious frame. Perhaps I Saw the TV Glow could be compared to Donnie Darko, only without the wit; without the mystery; without the cinematic technique; without the star quality acting talent; and… without the narrative coherence. 1/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com