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In Search of a More Welcoming Reality
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is an enveloping, confounding film about isolation, gender transition, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I Saw the TV Glow comes from Jane Schoenbrun, who in 2021 directed the haunting, semi-opaque We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a film about a lonesome teenage girl creating videos as part of an online horror challenge and an equally lonesome-seeming middle-aged man who makes contact with her, claiming to be concerned for her well-being. I Saw the TV Glow, which just premiered at Sundance, will be released by A24 and is a much sleeker production with familiar actors, cameos from Phoebe Bridgers and Buffy ’s Amber Benson, and a lush suburban-gothic aesthetic that periodically gives way to a pitch-perfect lower-resolution recreation of a ’90s television series. Its tapestry of pop-culture references is as evocative as the rich sensory details that arrive onscreen like bursts of memory — Owen walking inside the colorful bubble of an aloft parachute in middle-school gym class or reclining in the back seat of the car in the dark and looking up at his mom as she drives.
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