Martin Scorsese has recommended everyone watch one of the year’s most acclaimed psychological horror movies, I Saw the TV Glow, saying that he liked the film “a great deal”.
The 82-year-old director has recently shut down rumours about a potential retirement, after two film projects were postponed and also faced criticism from Nicole Kidman for the lack of female focused movies he makes.
Away from his own films, Scorsese, an avid cinephile, is always watching movies both new and old and was asked recently by the Associated Press if he had seen anything recently that he enjoyed.
He only named one new movie, saying: “There was one film I liked a great deal I saw two weeks ago called I Saw the TV Glow.”
Expanding on his thoughts on the film, the Goodfellas and Taxi Driver director said: “It really was emotionally and psychologically powerful and very moving. It builds on you, in a way.”
“ I didn’t know who made it,” Scorsese admitted before naming the director, Jane Schoenbrun.
I Saw the TV Glow stars Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as a pair of friends, Owen and Maddy, who become obsessed with a mysterious late-night show called “The Pink Opaque”.
As they become more and more engrossed in the show, they both begin to question their own place in the world and their sense of reality.
The film has been compared to the likes of Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has also been likened to a trans allegory.
In a five-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey writes: “Good allegories, of course, feel infinite. And I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.
“‘When I think about that stuff it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides,’ Owen says. ‘But I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.’ Schoenbrun’s film bottles the intensity of that feeling, and how frightening it is to be seen when you can’t see yourself.”
The film unfortunately only had a limited release when it came out in July but has since been made available for rent on Amazon Prime.
Scorsese was also asked if he’d recommend an older film for everyone to watch, saying: “People should see A Face in the Crowd over and over again. I think that’d be important.”
