The trailer for A24’s new film “I Saw the TV Glow” should hit close to home for anyone who’s ever become deeply obsessed with a TV show. Like, deeply obsessed.
The original film from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun (“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) follows two outsider teenagers who connect over their shared love of a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like TV series called “The Pink Opaque.” But when Owen (Justice Smith) falls even deeper into the fandom, his grip on reality begins to break.
The deeply original pic debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to pretty rapturous reviews, and Schoenbrun told TheWrap that the story is a deeply personal one for them as a trans and non-binary filmmaker.
“It’s much more about feeling so in love with television and a television show because you’re not able to be present and be yourself in the real world,” they explained. “So it’s about fandom in a way, but I think it’s about much more about – at least for me – a queer experience of kind of looking for glimmers of a magic that I thought couldn’t exist in real life in art and in entertainment. And it’s about how that can be a really loving exchange, but also how that can trap you in the ways that we all, I think, culturally dissociate.”
The film is, indeed, a trip with some terrifying visuals and a startlingly accurate recreation of what a 1990s genre TV show like “Buffy” looks like.
Check out the trailer for yourself above. The film also stars Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, and Helena Howard, Fred Durst and Danielle Deadwyler and features a soundtrack packed with original music from the likes of Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers and Snail Mail.
“I Saw the TV Glow” opens in theaters on May 3.
