I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow
Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs, when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show-one which conveys a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen's view of reality begins to crack.
Varun reviewedJanuary 26, 2025
I had two wildly opposite experiences during the film. The first 45 mins I found to be really slow paced and even though I understand they wanted to do a long portrayal of childhood, it felt like a set up that took too much time and my mind started to wander. But the final 45 minutes absolutely transfixed my body, mind and soul. There’s an 8 minute monologue from Maddy that resonated with me so hard. Since I immigrated to the other side of the world when I was 15, dealing with culture shock, identity crisis, loss of friendships, heartbreak, questioning the role of memories, spending so much mental energy dealing with emotions and thoughts that I’d never experienced before and how that affects your perception of time, the metaphor of her not feeling like she was in the right world, right body, right era was so relatable. We also drown ourselves in media to escape, and especially when we’re kids, these shows etch themselves into our memories so deeply we start to romanticise about them but at the same time since they’re not real activities we did ourselves but just a form of consumption, we don’t have a normal sense of time. If you had asked me what I did in 2017, I literally could not tell you because I can’t remember anything from that year as all I did was consume media and this pattern repeats itself in chunks in the following years. And then you start wondering how the years keep increasing but the quantity of experiences do not match your age whatsoever because your life is not yours anymore and your attention has been hijacked by corporations. This movie has such a mesmerising style in conveying the power of nostalgia, how the art and beliefs you consume as a kid have a way stronger subconscious impact than anything you watch as an adult. It’s weird how the transformation from childhood to adulthood isn’t as smooth as we expect it to be and feels almost like a complete break. My older life and inner child feel so completely alien to me, like those memories have been implanted by Mr. Melancholy which is an apt name because that’s the emotion I feel when I look back at photographs and videos of my childhood. I think it’s super important to reckon with these feelings in order to get in touch with your authenticity but most of us just keep on going with “life’s priorities” as Owen chooses to do for years until one final day he has a complete breakdown. No matter how long you spend ignoring your true self, it will come back to bite you one day. A breakdown is an opportunity for you to recognise the problem and change, but you can easily just go back to repeating the same patterns like Owen and “get busy dying”. I also appreciated that they did not choose suicide as a metaphor to escape the world but chose being buried alive as the key which I interpreted as dealing with your Jungian shadow self, as you can never kill your demons but can keep them buried once you learn to face the truth everyday and practice living a life that attunes your inner and external realities. This movie reminded me of Past Lives but here it’s a weird, hypnotic, dreamlike, metaphorical exploration of similar themes. One of my favourite colours is purple so it was cool to see the visual language drenched with a neon aesthetic of different shades, it never feels overdone and enhances the otherworldly, somber and surreal tone of the film. I thought this would be a traditional horror film, but the horror it taps into is something real that many experience every single day, the angst and pain of not being able to embody your true self, to not have anyone to share it with and feeling stuck wondering if that day will ever arrive where you feel real freedom and happiness. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the second half of the film and thought certain themes were brilliantly explored, whether the slow pacing leads to a payoff or not is completely dependent on the relatability to your personal life and if it’s style of storytelling succeeds in invoking certain emotions and memories within you.