In September 2022, I was sitting down to watch Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. I knew nothing about the film outside of its buzzy, if complicated, Sundance premiere and some divided reactions from my peers. What could’ve been a run-of-the-mill lo-fi indie horror flick quickly morphed into something far greater. Through its incessant ambience and white noise, it first lulled you into a sense of security and tranquil domesticity, and even a half-hearted boredom. Then, slowly but surely, the film’s more sinister dealings began seeping out. Notes of grief, neglect, depression, and social isolation intermingled with an increasingly fuzzy, transient, and foreboding sense of doom: a sense that something malicious lurked in the ambiguous recesses of the interwebs. Much like the various creepypastas I grew up reading on the internet, this film found existential terror in the vaguely uncanny, the subtly indescribable, and most of all, in the comforts and dangers the internet can provide. This refuge for the outcast and misunderstood, this perpetuation of self-destructive behavior can be a salve and a poison.

Now, not even two years later, here I sit in the wake of Schoenbrun’s followup, the A24 (and Emma Stone)-backed I Saw the TV Glow. World’s Fair has grown from a film I respect to one I deeply love and find a multitude of uniquely youthful, resonant themes in. Though it may be the stylistic antithesis to Everything Everywhere All at Once, it is like-minded in its exorcism of innately modern existential fears regarding the omnipresence of the internet and the fear of getting snuffed out by the electromagnetic void. Seemingly further emboldened in their craft (and bolstered by a heftier budget, of course), in I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has only doubled down on what makes their work so personal, insightful, and uncommonly terrifying.

We open with young tween Owen (Justice Smith), a lonely, listless soul quietly, unceremoniously at odds with the mid-90s suburbia that envelops him. This all changes when he meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a dark, mysterious, but welcoming girl two years older than him. She has a more than committed interest in The Pink Opaque, a Buffy-esque teen show that Owen has long been allured by but has never seen due to it airing at 10:30 pm. One night, he sneaks over to her house to watch the show and becomes immediately enamored. Over the next couple years, Owen and Maddy form a friendship around their mutual television obsession, only growing more attached as the world around them seems to offer nothing but misfortune, judgment, and, perhaps worst of all, an uncaring aloofness. The world outside of The Pink Opaque lacks interest in how they feel, who they are, and who they wish to be. Soon, the refuge of the show becomes their home, offering a sense of purpose and belonging the real world could never muster.

At the heart of I Saw the TV Glow is this divide between the real and the fictional, the authentic and the performative, the creative and the commodified, the innately queer and the “normal.” Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary themself, is undoubtedly drawing from their own experience of feeling at odds with the binary prescriptions of greater society simply by existing. It’s an air of dissonance and distrust of a “simulated” reality that harkens back to The Matrix, a famed cinematic allegory for transness that’s as ubiquitous as it is rightfully beloved. But Schoenbrun smartly avoids labels on their undeniably non-conforming leads, creating an allegory for the alienation and societal discrepancy of the queer experience at large, all while gleaning enough broad social insight to make even our dear little cishets feel included. However, while The Matrix inherently indulges in the heroism of breaking free from a cisheteronormative system, and justifiably so, Schoenbrun is much more interested in a meaner, dirtier, and more inconsolably helpless approach to such themes. Defiantly disconnecting from “the matrix” is a lovely thought, but that’s not how the real world works. No matter how individual and outwardly queer one presents themselves, they have no choice but to operate within an external world that, no matter how indifferently tolerant, does not prioritize their existence (and in fact often presumes and incentivizes the opposite). Is there ever true freedom under a cisheteronormative capitalist system?

Schoenbrun previously discussed how their greatest inspiration for this film was David Lynch’s astonishing Twin Peaks: The Return, which allowed them to create this strongly surreal, unflinchingly bleak look at queer existence. Capitalizing on their previously established affinity for grainy, obscure, foreboding, existential horror, Schoenbrun’s hopeless opus treats natural queerness as it treats the unbridled imagination of childhood: an idyllic, beautiful, fragile thing that the world will inevitably smash to pieces. It’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when.” Heteronormative society does not incentivize queerness. Adult capitalism does not incentivize imagination or creativity. Are they even two distinct things? In the end, you must conform, you must shut up, and you certainly must not cause a scene. How inefficient it would be if you didn’t follow the rules! Schoenbrun boldly questions how real the “real world” can possibly be if everyone is putting on a performance as they try desperately to fit in and succeed within the dominant system. And if one ends up dissociating into the fantastical world of a TV show where their true self feels empowered, are they truly all that crazy? After all, the “real world” is an overrated sham, a façade of mindless static and suppressed authenticity. It’s only a matter of time before the void of conformity comes for us all. If childhood is a utopian refuge, then to grow up is to destroy your soul, to resign yourself to profit over purity, to choose commodity over creation. Much as Twin Peaks: The Return revels in the futility of human action against the pervasive, all-destroying cycle of exploitation and trauma, I Saw the TV Glow sees growing up and assimilating into greater society as an apocalypse of the human soul. One way or the other, the true “you” has to die.

Of course, on a formal level, everything about this film is purely astonishing. Schoebrun’s direction and writing has only grown in its haunting, hypnotic, horrific beauty, as well as in its psychosocial astuteness and cultural relevance. A surreal lo-fi queer horror masterpiece? In this economy? Justice Smith gives a highly commendable performance as the shy, awkward, internalized Owen whose sense of shame is the only thing stronger than his social alienation. But it is Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy who gives the truly extraordinary lead performance. Enigmatic yet earnest, they help craft a character whose complete and utter prescription to the governance of The Pink Opaque is not a mere pastime but a necessity of survival. In a hopeless, soul-killing world driven by soulless capital and heteronormative expectations, to dissociate is to survive. It’s their monologue around the midpoint of the film that completely drove this film home thematically for me. I was distraught, I was brought to tears, and my entire outlook on the world was revolutionized (for better and for worse). 

Everything about this film contributes to the one-of-a-kind tone Schoenbrun has crafted. The cinematography is gorgeous and absorbing in its neon-soaked, grainy, reality-breaking aesthetics. The editing is flowing and dreamlike with fades abound. The sound is as hypnotic as it is frightening and mechanical. And of course, the haunting score and curated soundtrack are nothing short of iconic. Everything works in tandem to create an atmosphere that feels otherworldly, as if the tendrils of The Pink Opaque really are entrenching themselves into the earth of the real world. And this surreal aesthetic ironically grounds this story further to become something so deeply personal. Its characters’ torments and pervasive insecurities inform the film’s apocalyptic nature. 

Ultimately, I Saw the TV Glow is a film I can talk about at length to discuss its themes, characters, personal inspiration, hyper-artistic influences, and technical virtuosity. That being said, it is also a film that can only truly be experienced firsthand. It is a technical, personal, irrevocably queer acceptance of the apocalypse of conformity. It’s one of the most innately hopeless, philosophically horrific films I’ve seen in a long while, but there’s a beauty in the honesty, a quietly reclaimed power. It is an acceptance, but it is far from a surrender. For the only thing worse than queer alienation and relying on vaguely queer-coded media to give you purpose is to completely resign yourself to the system and kill the part of yourself that doesn’t fit the mold. Society is a sluggish, oppressive, capitalist beast that threatens to consume us all with no satiation in sight, but the beauty of queerness is that it is equally permanent and resilient. With I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun faces their personal queer personal apocalypse head on, and boldly chooses to exist in spite of, all while making a modern horror masterpiece in the process. That is incredible.

10/10