Sundance film festival: Jane Schoenbrun’s stunning second feature is both a horror-inflected story of teens fixated on a Buffy-esque TV show and a haunting trans allegory
The post-Get Out influx of “elevated” horror films, more focused on the construction of a smug metaphor than coherence or cohesion, has become a blight on an already blighted genre. It’s an incredibly difficult web to weave – even Jordan Peele himself facing the odd stumble since his ground-shifting breakout – yet still so many keep trying, dissertations clumsily disguised as films.
But in I Saw the TV Glow, a buzzy, brilliant new film premiering at the Sundance film festival, the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has made it all look so easy, crafting something loaded with meaning yet light on its feet, provoking us to discussion and debate while never feeling like an academic exercise – a movie that never forgets that it’s, well, a movie.
I Saw the TV Glow is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year
