Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: I SAW THE TV GLOW [Sundance Film Festival 2024 - Park City, Utah]

"I Saw The TV Glow" [Midnight] is an interesting play on mythology and the notion of self, in all of its facets of what the characters want but more importantly how they exist. Justice Smith as Owen again continues to show his possibility for making interesting material. Paired here with Brigette Lundy-Paine (who was fantastic as "Little Bill" in "Bill & Ted Face The Music") as Maddie...they are two people unsure of who they are and what they want to be. Their life becomes focused on a TV show they both like: "The Pink Opaque" kind of like "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" style but with a psychic bent. The film seems to take place in the early 90s but that dictate is never quite made. What is quite interesting is the play of time through the film. The first iteration of Owen is played by another actor but all the way through the two of them (Smith and Lundy-Paine) share a bond of not fitting in but that this show brings them together. Owen's home life is not awful but not great. His mother is sick. His dad (played interestingly by Fred Durst) is not understanding. Maddie herself seems to live in a Twilight Zone episode.

But as the film rolls along it seemingly seems to be motion more towards David Lynch. At one point in themiddle Owen and Maddie meet at a place after not seeing each other for a while. The music being performed on stage is haunting (at times), beautiful (at others), gentle and aggressive....literally the ying and yang of these two characters. It is many ways like "The Roadhouse" in "Twin Peaks". After that the idea of what the movie is and what our characters really are changes (not badly but in perhaps a different direction from where they were going). Like "Poor Things", which Emma Stone starred in (she produces heer), it is about where we can exist and be happy. Maddie always seemed obsessed but never happy....she seems to find herself, she says, when she is reborn after being buried alive (a not so subtle referrence to a certain "Kill Bill" sequence.) But her need to explain borders on disassocative disorder (specifically in a scene inside a makeshift planetarium). Owen himself is stuck in what he believes himself to be and what he won't do. Like "Twin Peaks' especially "The Return", it skews memories in certain ways to make it seems like it time is lost when essentially it slipped away. Even the final shot plays to this notion of emergence while losing itself (or himself) in the expectation of society. However the world that is created is one that is both lost and found. A-

By Tim Wassberg