Martin Scorsese knows who Caroline Polachek and Phoebe Bridgers are, and his daughter Francesca didn’t even need to show him. It’s actually because the director heard their music in I Saw The TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun‘s recent masterpiece of trans, trippy horror for A24.
“There was one film I liked a great deal I saw two weeks ago called I Saw the TV Glow,” the Killers Of The Flower Moon director recently told AP. “It really was emotionally and psychologically powerful and very moving. It builds on you, in a way. I didn’t know who made it. It’s this Jane Schoenbrun.”
Schoenbrun reacted how any of us likely would upon seeing our names come out of the legendary director’s mouth, even in print. “I JUST GOT A FEVER AND LAID DOWN ON THE GROUND AND STARTED PANTING,” they posted on Twitter (X), along with an exhaling emoji. I Saw The TV Glow is Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature; they previously wrote and directed Sundance standout We’re All Going To The World’s Fair in 2021.
I Saw The TV Glow stars Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Owen and Maddy, two dispirited suburban teens who bond over a Buffy-style show called The Pink Opaque, before realizing it may have been a lot more than a TV show in the first place. The A.V. Club also loved the film. “It won’t be for everyone, but for those that get it, I Saw The TV Glow is proof of Schoenbrun’s place as one of the most exciting, singular voices in horror and genre cinema right now,” Matthew Jackson wrote in his “A” review. “It’s a triumph of a very particular kind of beautiful darkness, inviting you, much like its characters, to get happily lost in its images.”
I Saw The TV Glow isn’t the only recent film to get the Scorsese stamp of approval. Either he’s doing some free advertising for A24 or trying to get on board as their next auteur-director, because he’s also praised Ti West’s Pearl and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. While he waits for that contract to come through, Scorsese is hosting, narrating, and executive producing a docudrama for Fox Nation about some of some of the great saints of history called Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. You can check out the trailer for that below: