I saw this film advertised a while back. I found the trailer and first few screens to be interesting. It was marketed as something like a horror and thriller, which definitely seemed quite engaging given the time it was being announced, when a lot of indie films were starting to release with similar themes. Though, I didn't really hear anything about the film for the longest time after that. I think some aspects of its marketing fell flat, or initial screenings just made it clear what sort of film it really was. A lot of online reviews claim that the film was falsely advertised because of what the trailer looked like compared to the actual release. I actually didn't even know the film was actually out until a few minutes before finding it on Letterboxd again. A site I've been using a lot lately to find things to watch each day without having to endlessly scroll through streaming services. There is a pinned post in the community that was made a few years ago on why you should also use it, so check that out if you haven't! Moving on though, I Saw the TV Glow seemed to have missed with the general public, I think it had a bit of a silent release and didn't quite turn out to be what people generally expected. And I do certainly feel that way too after trying to watch it.
And I mean trying because a rare circumstance took place: I could not finish the film. And this is a film that has about a nice 90 minute runtime, of which I tend to write a bout a lot for being the general sweet spot for little stories that don't overstay their welcome. I Saw the TV Glow didn't feel lik a film that was 90 minutes though, it felt like a film that was twice the runtime, and never really did anything with it. A slow burn that had already sizzled out and was nothing but a bore of ember from the first twenty minutes as it became a film that pretended to be psychological but was really just a film about mentally ill teenagers polluted by ideologies they didn't understand yet. This became clear with the use of certain techniques that felt odd, reliant on the idea of teen youth and the chaos of the mind that hasn't yet developed. I just did not like what it was trying to say and how. Feeling almost predatory on the youth as it tried to portray a problem as something entirely incomprehensible to others, mistaking the troubled minds of teenagers as something that nobody understands. It did all of this in such a vague manner that it appears as something like a thriller, implying there was something more to it. But there's no mistake, it's all just a metaphor.
I hadn't really heard of Jane Schoenbrun before, and looking up the works from this director, it definitely didn't leave much hope for the film. The more I read about them, the more I began to realise I was diving into a film that's definitely not for me.
I Saw the TV Glow
It's hard to not want to start writing about the things I didn't like about this film, but I'll do my best to start on the things I did. This appears to be a film shot on the 35mm film stock format, and it's a film that certainly has a lot of nice colours and lighting with the use of film grain. A lot of the film takes place in darker environments, with the assumption that at night these teenagers would watch a television show that would tell stories on horror and thrillers. This sort of becomes a bit of an addiction for two students which bond over the television series, but much of the story remains vague to begin with. The film has a lot of a dreamlike appearance to it, a lot of it is shot like a mild nightmare in which things don't really make sense, or the passing of time is barely noticeable, and sometimes this works nicely with the use of time skips as the story moves forward every few years, from our protagonist's preteen years to adulthood. In terms of cinematography, it is a very beautiful film. I really enjoyed some of the perspectives used, the wide angle shots with leading lines, the up-close perspectives of characters with them in the middle. In this regard I feel the film really did well.
But it began to lose me with the story, a film that starts of with some atmosphere and certainly implies something, then begins to take you in another direction as we look into a character that we never really get much information about, and this happens to a lot of the characters. We never really see any emotion from them, everything seems dark and quiet, void of personality. I'm not sure why we are supposed to feel for these characters with nothing to really know about them. And the constant references to the television show don't really add anything to this depth at all. Writing appears on the screen a lot that seems to be reliant on this connection to the show, as we see references made, typical youthful scribbles of thoughts and text about things mixed with pop culture drawings and ideas. A whole lot of pink. The more you look into it, the more you see the references refer to teenage angst. But again, we never really get to see why there is such angst. Nothing seems out of the ordinary for these people for the most part. It holds such a slow story that you quickly begin to just stop caring and wanting the film to end.
The whole reference to the tv glowing almost seems like an addiction. A form of mental illness in which this show socially conditioned these youth into being brainless zombies. And that's really how things feel. That's definitely not the intent of the film. But the more the film progressed and the less things made sense, it does start to have you trying to figure out your own logical reasons behind things. Though this loneliness and angst is really just a weird metaphor for supposedly how 'non-binary' children tend to feel. The horror here is probably more in the ways in which society tries to encourage such ideologies into already vulnerable people. And I Saw the TV Glow tries to pretend otherwise, assuming all of this is purely a lonesome, internal psychological battle. The more I watched, the less I felt this was a film watching until the end, and that's unfortunately what happened. I gave up halfway, uninterested, and feeling that I just didn't care what happened from that point on. Which again is a shame given the impressive directing and cinematography, a lot of good effort put into the two to create some visually beautiful images.
I don't think I Saw the TV Glow is a film for most people, and I think that's why ultimately it ended up falling flat on its face. The reason why I never heard that it came out and never really saw any discussion of it online. While it has good ratings, those ratings seem to come from the specific, very niche demographic it was made for. That's fine, but if you aren't that demographic, this is a film that holds nothing for you, and you're better off just ignoring it and watching something else.
