Jane Schoenbrun confirms her place as a superbly gifted film-maker with the weirdly wonderful story of two misfits finding solace in a creepy TV show
Cinephiles lie awake at night worrying that talented young film-makers are deserting cinema for TV. Jane Schoenbrun, one of the most gifted around, has just made a superb feature film about a fictional TV show, imagined here with such loving and unnerving intensity that it surely can’t be long before they are called upon to conjure up a dozen or so episodes for real. With a compelling cod-90s score by Schoenbrun’s musical collaborator Alexander Giannascoli, or Alex G, I Saw the TV Glow lives on in my head. It deserves cult classic status without the “cult”; it is deeply scary, deeply strange and deeply sad, a deadly serious new version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge for the 2020s.
Schoenbrun made a brilliant impression with a startling debut in 2021 that exploited the lockdown-Zoom aesthetic with an ingenuity that, for me, is still unmatched by any other film, the no-budget chiller We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, about a young woman drawn into the world of online gaming and collaboratively authored creepypasta-type online horror. There were no in-person dialogue scenes: everyone was alone in an atomised universe. Now we are in the pre-internet world of the 1990s, in a high school where parents are voting for a second Clinton term. Owen, played by Ian Foreman as a kid and as an adult by Justice Smith (from Benjamin Caron’s thriller Sharper), is a deeply unhappy person, unsure about his relationship with his mother, about his sexuality, about everything. He meets the older, supercool, emo-ish Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, channelling a very young Winona Ryder), equally unhappy and abused by her stepdad. She is queer (as hardly anyone used to say in 1996) and, asked about his own preferences, Owen says shyly that he “likes TV shows”.