justice smith

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

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I saw I Saw the TV Glow at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, a five-day horror marathon that’s held in New Orleans every Spring.  In an attempt to put my festival pass to full use, I crammed my schedule with new releases, spending noon to midnight at a downtown shopping mall for a four-day stretch of the fest.  I skipped sleep, meals, and parties so I could disappear into The Movies, only seeing friends in passing if they happened to catch me in line for a screening.  It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the Overlook title that has stuck with me most was the one about the self-destructive distraction of niche media obsession.  Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the isolation-of-the-internet drama We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the corrosive isolation of obsessively watching television instead of living a real, authentic life.  It felt absurd to immediately get in line for another movie right after its credits rolled, but I found myself doing it anyway, refusing to wake up from my self-induced screen rot stupor.  It didn’t exactly change my life, but it did make me sincerely question some things about how I’m living it.

Justice Smith stars as a socially petrified suburban nerd who’s afraid to fully express himself to anyone, including himself.  The closest he gets to breaking out of his shell is in watching The Pink Opaque, a 90s kids’ fantasy show about two psychically linked summer camp friends who are geographically separated but still fight supernatural evil as a team.  Styled after retro Nickelodeon programming like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Pink Opaque is the kind of deceptively complex children’s programming that roots itself in a young audience’s brains for a lifetime, immediately triggering dormant memories & feelings with just a couple still images or a few notes of a theme song.  It’s also a show specifically marketed to girls, so our timid protagonist is afraid to be caught watching it, both out of fear of his homophobic brute father (an unrecognizable, terrifying Fred Durst) and out of fear of what it might awaken in his own psychology.  He finds refuge in an older, lesbian student at his school (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who sneaks taped episodes of The Pink Opaque into his possession, so that their real-life relationship mirrors the psychic link between the distanced besties of their favorite show.  When his only friend asks him to join her in breaking out of the oppressive social & familial ruts of the suburbs, he’s too scared to go.  The show is then abruptly cancelled, reality breaks, and the parts of himself he refuses to confront devour his soul while he suffocates in isolation.

I Saw the TV Glow is the melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon.  It’s specifically targeted at Millennial nostalgia for vintage, tape-warped 90s media, but like Brigsby Bear it’s clear-eyed in its messaging that disappearing into that media is not a healthy substitute for a real-world social life.  It’s impossible not to read this particular version of that story as a cautionary tale for would-be transgender people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, to the point where Shoenbrun practically reaches through the screen to shake that specific audience awake with the handwritten message “There is still time.”  Even if you don’t need to be encouraged to embrace your true, hidden gender identity, the movie still hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, or community by disappearing into niche media consumption instead.  Like World’s Fair, it’s an emotionally heavy film that touches on themes of suicide, loneliness, and parental abuse.  No amount of Pete & Pete visual references or prop Fruitopia vending machines can ease the pain weighing on its heart.  If anything, its nostalgia for vintage 90s media only gets more sinister the more it’s used as an emotional crutch; the Trip to the Moon-styled villain of The Pink Opaque becomes a stand-in for suicidal depression and his on-the-ground moon minions become gender dysphoria demons who go away if you stop thinking about them but never die if you never confront them. 

The most frequent complaint about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was that it was mismarketed as a horror film when really it’s just a melancholy drama about a terminally-online teenager who’s so lonely she deliberately loses her grip on reality.  It was bold of Overlook to screen Schoenbrun’s next film alongside the program’s more recognizable ghouls, ghosts, and ballerina vampires, then, since their customer base can be vocally opinionated about what does or does not count as Horror; I can still hear echoes of bros in black t-shirts grumbling after their 2019 screening of Jennifer Reader’s Knives & Skin.  I Saw the TV Glow has a much stronger case for being programmed in a horror genre context than World’s Fair, though, since it depicts a full supernatural breakdown of reality after the cancellation of The Pink Opaque.  Tape warp TV static and monster-of-the-week villains invade the real world of our emotionally-closed-off protagonist with escalating violence the longer he ignores who he really is.  The static even invades his body, literalizing the dysphoric sensation he describes of having his insides dug out with a shovel.  Maybe it’s more of a nightmare drama in the way Ari Aster pitched Beau is Afraid as “a nightmare comedy,” but it’s a goddamned nightmare either way – one that the volatile combination of rigid social norms and insurmountable personal anxiety make countless people suffer every day.   It made me so sad I felt physically ill, and then I immediately disappeared into another horror movie so I didn’t have to think about it for too long.

-Brandon Ledet

The Voyeurs (2021)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of praise online for the supposed return to form for erotic thrillers that’s been happening on major streaming services.  While the biggest movie franchises in the world—The Fast and the Furious, the MCU, Star Wars, etc.—have completely removed sex & eroticism from the movie theater, at-home streamers like Netflix have scored minor word-of-mouth hits for hornt-up trash like 365 Days and Deadly Illusions.  I think praising this ripple-sized “wave” of straight-to-streaming erotic thrillers as some kind of return to the genre’s 1980s-90s heyday overlooks a plenty of much better, riskier examples of the recent past like Double Lover, Knife+Heart, and Stranger By the Lake.  What’s being championed instead of those modern genre gems is the straight-to-VHS softcore version of that revival, which is fine.  At the very least, Netflix’s recent, self-reported success in producing mainstream home-video erotica is inspiring their competitors to make more of the stuff to attract that bored & thirsty market while it’s viable.  And now Amazon Prime has taken a swing at the erotic thriller throwback with its in-house release The Voyeurs.  I’d argue that their movie studio wing has already done a great job of bringing erotic menace back to the multiplex in much more creative, daring titles like The Neon Demon, Suspiria and, most recently, Annette.  Still, I had a lot of fun with their goofy, salacious entry into the home-video end of the genre, with all of its lustful coveting of what Netflix was doing in private.

The Voyeurs is basically Hitchcock’s Rear Window reimagined (maybe un-imagined?) for the straight-to-video erotic thriller genre, making it the second delightfully inane Rear Window homage of the year, following The Woman in the Window.  It’s much more ludicrous & consistently fun than Joe Wright’s film, however, pushing its idiotic internal logic towards a spectacularly trashy third-act climax that would be a water-cooler discussion topic for months if it were a proper theatrical release instead of a disposable streamer.  We start with a young couple (Euphoria‘s Sydney Sweeney & Detective Pikachu‘s Justice Smith) moving into their first apartment together in Montreal.  The French-Canadian substitute for Parisian lust & romance is pronounced early & often, with Montreal being introduced through its lingerie boutiques and described as “Fuck City”.  Mostly, though, it’s as cold and isolating as any major city in the North, which leads its doe-eyed Millennial protagonists to huddle up in their gorgeous apartment.  Instead of retreating into the modern incuriosity with the physical world around them that plagues most Kids These Days, they find themselves fascinated with the constantly nude gym-body couple across the street whose living room & bedroom windows are clearly visible from their own loft.  This initial curiosity quickly snowballs into full-blown erotic obsession, with many crossed lines, a surprising number of dead bodies, and an even more surprising number of onscreen orgasms. 

It’s the third act twists that really elevate The Voyeurs above the routine tedium of straight-to-streaming thrillers that get released on a weekly basis.  Its flat cinematography and the robotic mannerisms of its cast reinforce the terrifying reality that the house style of The CW has become one of the major cinematic influences of our time, but there is one major benefit to it suffering the many ills of modern streaming #content: its sprawling 2-hour runtime.  The rising-action portion of this steamy thriller hits all the exact beats that you’d expect, from the young couple’s decision to buy baby-pervs’ first set of binoculars to their inevitable escalation of making physical contact with the neighbors they’ve been spying on as foreplay.  Once all those lustful indulgences are out of the way, it’s time to teach them (and the lustful audience indulging through their POV) a hard-earned lesson through the most ludicrous mechanism possible.  And then the film goes an extra beat to allow our horny-for-the-first-time anti-heroes a chance to take revenge.  It’s a rare instance where the unrushed, over-plotted runtime that’s become standard for most modern mainstream films is actually used to its full advantage: giving the audience exactly what we want out of the genre, then pushing it into shameless, delirious excess no one really wanted or needed out of this simple tale of erotic voyeurism.  It delivers on the sexual menace promised by its premise, then stumbles around making incredibly goofy decisions in the post-coital afterglow, something we’ve all been through before.

There are a few distinguishing details that make The Voyeurs memorably stylish in its own dopey way: its soundtrack’s dream pop cover of Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” its attempts to kink-up the intimacy of routine eye exams, its protagonist’s unlikely transformation into a rooftop superhero, etc.  For the most part, though, it’s most enjoyable as a standout example of a larger industry trend: the shameful slinking-off of the mainstream erotic thriller from public movie theaters to private maturbatoriums.  I doubt any of these word-of-mouth streamers will ever hit me the same way as seeing my beloved, filthy Double Lover with a packed, in-the-flesh film festival crowd, but I guess I have to appreciate these deliriously horny novelties wherever I can find them.  I’m always pushing for movies to be simultaneously sexier & sillier, and The Voyeurs admirably tears itself in both directions.

-Brandon Ledet