Film review: I Saw the TV Glow show how an impressionable mind might become unmoored from reality

This film is both a love letter to the wildly inventive teen imagination, and an exploration of the darker reaches of obsession

I Saw The TV Glow stars Justice Smith as Owen and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy

• I Saw the TV Glow
• ★★★☆☆
• Cinematic release

Set in small-town America in the mid-1990s, I Saw the TV Glow (15A) stars Justice Smith as Owen, a friendless young teen who is introduced to a new TV show, The Pink Opaque, by Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine).

A Buffy-style show that finds its heroines, Isabel and Tara, doing weekly battle with all manner of mythical evil as they communicate via ‘the psychic plane’, The Pink Opaque offers harmless escapist thrills.

But as Maddy and Owen fall under the show’s hypnotic spell, their own reality – in which each has to deal with emotionally distant, authoritarian fathers – grows increasingly dark until, just as the final episode airs, Maddy disappears without trace.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow is on the one hand a love letter to the wildly inventive teen imagination, and on the other an exploration of the darker reaches of obsession as Maddy and Owen’s fascination with The Pink Opaque – and its main villain, the ominously named Mr Melancholy – spirals out of control.

Deliberately unsettling, the movie jumps back and forth in time, and in and out of fantasy and the everyday world, as it illustrates how an impressionable mind might easily become disorientated and unmoored from reality.