It's the attack of The Drain Lords!

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2024

#11 :  I Saw The TV Glow

This year saw the release of an extraordinary film about the potency of nostalgia and the power of fandom. No, we're not talking about Deadpool & Wolverine, much as we loved the arrival of Marvel Jesus in the MCU. We are in fact talking about writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s stunning sophomore feature, I Saw The TV Glow. A queer psychological horror that's as emotionally profound as it is unapologetically weird, Schoenbrun’s late 90s set gem follows Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), two outcasts who bond over their shared obsession with a TV show that gives them a chance to escape. To say much more would honestly be to spoil the wonder of watching Schoenbrun’s singularly strange yet beautiful progeny for the first time, but suffice it to say that once you have fallen under The Pink Opaque's spell, you'll never be the same again.

I had heard of this but didn't really know anything about it - and the description above hasn't exactly helped. It sounds like a horror film that's not really all that scary - and boy do I feel like I'm tempting fate by typing that...

Well, if I thought the last film was Lynchian at times, then this one is "You call that Lynchian? Hold my beer..." - it even features a Julee Cruse style song in a dodgy club (done by Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl). It also has a very Donniedarkoesque feel to it - dealing with teen alienation, identity and blurring of boundaries within a dream-like and hyper-stylised landscape. It's all very stylish and quite intriguing - I spent a lot of the film watching it open-mouthed trying to work out what was going to happen next.

And having watched it through to the very, very peculiar ending, I can also tell you I suspect the reason Empire doesn't tell you much about it is not because they don't want to spoil if for you - it's because they don't have the faintest idea what it's about. However, having read up various internet theories on what the film meant, I can see that some of them actually make some kind of sense, but I'd never have got there on my own. I can also categorically state from looking at the internet that this film means an awful lot to some people - I suspect that's at least partly because the vague nature of it allows them to decide it means whatever they want it to mean and therefore decide it's massively relevant to their lives. 

Justice and Brigette (weird spelling!) are very much the centre of this film and they carry it well (if somewhat intriguingly). Somewhat bizarrely, both of them often either use very peculiar voices or have been edited to be like that - they sound slowed down, which adds to the weirdness of it all. There are some reasonable well known names in the rest of the cast including Danielle Deadwyler, Lindsey Jordan (better known as snail mail), Fred Durst (lead singer of Limp Bizkit) and Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy).

Despite it not making any sense, it all looks very stylish - it adopts an interesting "dark neon" style throughout with some intriguing animation thrown in. For only their second feature-length film, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has created a very confident piece of work, even if it's certainly not necessarily to everyone's taste.

But - was it to my taste? Well, as expected it's not really horror at all (just very, very weird!) so it didn't scare me off on that front and I enjoyed the intriguing and bizarre nature of it all. I would have preferred a slightly less confusing ending, but I did enjoy reading the theories about what it all meant (and even agreed with some of them!). Overall, I'd say this is another good film that you're almost certainly going to hate - I'm having a good laugh imagining the lovely Mrs Reed watching this. But if you liked Donnie Darko but thought "you know what, this just makes too much sense" then this is probably the film for you! If you fancy having your brain mildly warped, then it's available to stream on Sky Cinema or to rent in all the usual locations.

#12 - A good film you might well hate
#10 - Quite enchanting

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