Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow takes pop culture obsession and 90s nostalgia and transforms them into a creepy, strange, richly imaginative meditation on feeling not quite right in your own skin.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2024

There are some very creative and bold choices made here with the metaphors and symbolism. The true nature of the film's message just shows all its cards too early for such a slow-paced experience. The allegory feels redundant by the film's climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.25/5 | Aug 9, 2024

Incredible visuals and a thoughtful story make I Saw The TV Glow much more than an indie creep fest.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2024

Many moments unnerve, and a few may even alienate, but the sum is grandly and potently itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2024

An eerie and empathetic allegorical horror whose reality-bending conceits both unnerve and mesmerise.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2024

There’s something fresh and exciting about it, despite the almost deliberate slow-burn feel to its pacing

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 1, 2024

Its structure as drama at times wispily thin, I Saw the TV Glow is more mood board than movie, but its hypnotic visuals and ethereal alt-pop score perfectly conjure that febrile world of spooky intuition.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 29, 2024

With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2024

Trans writer-director Schoenbrun’s film is an instant classic, a disquieting but non-judgmental post-modern psychothriller about the value and dangers of wholesale immersion in visual media and the complexities of trans self-identification.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 29, 2024

The mythology, which becomes increasingly disturbing, is meticulous. But the same material proves a rich seam, a tale of roads not taken, a story that will speak to anyone who experienced an awkward pubescence or the jouissance of pop-culture enthusiasms.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 27, 2024

Jane Schoenbrun’s metaphysical drama is well shot and performed, but I never bought into the internal world or its central mythos. I’m sure that some people will take a lot from this, but it ultimately left me cold and somewhat disinterested.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2024

It’s a fascinating and ambitious lo-fi effort that is the textbook definition of “not for everyone”, and I’d be lying if I said that I fully loved this film, but at least holds your attention throughout its strange, and admirably original, runtime.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2024

[A] richly entertaining though deeply melancholic work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2024

Good allegories, of course, feel infinite. And I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 26, 2024

There’s a desperately important moral to this film... It’s a lesson told in a manner likely to elicit either declarations of “instant classic” or, over here in this seat, “swift turn-off”.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 26, 2024

I Saw the TV Glow is another exploration of the truths and falsity we find growing up in the suburbs of America, how impactful each viewer finds this rendition of these ideas and feelings will determine how much they do or don’t enjoy it.

Full Review | Original Score: 54/100 | Jul 26, 2024

The film’s eventual blurring between reality and fiction is not just a spooky narrative turn but a reflection on how our fixations with media can become surrogates for real experiences and interpersonal developments.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 26, 2024

It's a clever film, haunting and original, and the delightful Buffy-esque nods are intentional.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

I Saw the TV Glow is claustrophobic, unwholesome and brilliant.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 24, 2024

The best kind of personal film - a transmission directly from filmmaker to the audience member who needs it the most with a brazen message and affecting execution. You will find something in I Saw the TV Glow; or more accurately, it may find you.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2024