I Saw the TV Glow is about a television show, but Jane Schoenbrun is after something bigger than television. For the whole running time the film presses a single question: what happens when a story you love feels truer than the life you were given? Its answer is to let the two worlds leak into each other until neither holds still.

It begins in 1996, in suburbia. Owen (Justice Smith, with Ian Foreman as Young Owen) is a lonely teenager who meets Maddy (Jack Haven) at school. She introduces him to The Pink Opaque, a late-night young adult series about Isabel and Tara, two teenagers who use a psychic connection to fight the supervillain Mr. Melancholy. The show airs past Owen’s bedtime and his father disapproves of it, so he sneaks out to Maddy’s house to watch, and she gives him tapes of the episodes he misses. That ritual is the best thing in the first half: two outsiders, a secret schedule, a screen. Then Maddy says the show feels more real to her than her own life. It sounds like teenage hyperbole. By the end it is the film’s thesis.

The two leads carry this stretch. Haven plays Maddy with a certainty that makes her pull on Owen believable, and Smith keeps Owen half-formed, always a step behind what he feels. His arc leans more on bewilderment than on depth, and for a story about a self wearing away, that choice works. You believe he would follow her into a living room at midnight, and you believe he would not follow her out of town.

The film then jumps ahead. In 1998 Maddy decides to run away and expects Owen to come with her. He can’t. She vanishes, his mother Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler) dies of cancer, and The Pink Opaque is cancelled after five seasons. By 2006 Owen still lives with his father, Frank (Fred Durst), and works at a local movie theater. Maddy reappears one night with a story he can barely hear: she says she has spent the past two years inside the show.

This is where the film gets harder to hold. At her urging, Owen rewatches the final episode, in which Mr. Melancholy traps Isabel and Tara in a pocket universe called the Midnight Realm. He then suffers a breakdown and tries to push his head through the television screen until Frank pulls him back. The scene is violent and strange. It also asks a lot of the viewer, because the next night Maddy explains that she paid a man to bury her alive and woke up as Tara, and that Owen is really Isabel. Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan play those two characters inside the show, which gives the revelation a doubled, slightly eerie texture.

That turn is bold, and I only half bought it. The idea that a life can be a broadcast you mistook for your own is potent, and the film earns it in places. In others the metaphor feels asserted rather than discovered, and the last stretch tips toward explanation just when it should trust the silences it built earlier. The horror side is also thinner than the label promises. Mr. Melancholy, played by Emma Portner, shadows the story, yet I left the film bruised rather than scared.

Schoenbrun calls this the second part of their Screen Trilogy, after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and before Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and it ties into their novel Public Access Afterworld. The film premiered at Sundance on January 18, 2024, opened in a limited run from A24 on May 3, and went wider on May 17. Emma Stone and Dave McCary produced it through Fruit Tree. Critics were mostly warm, and it picked up five nominations at the 40th Independent Spirit Awards, Best Feature among them.

It is uneven, and I still recommend it, mostly for how well it knows the loneliness of loving a show, a band, a world that has no idea you exist.