Advance Review: Glass (2018)

When Unbreakable was being released, the primary trailer for it was an enigmatic and very effective piece of marketing. All you needed to get people into a theater after M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was to know that it was the same director. He became a household name overnight and anticipation for his next project was through the roof

Then, sometime in the mid-2000s, he lost it. Shyamalan fell almost as quickly as he had risen. His movies became a punchline. It is one of the most humbling moments in modern Hollywood.

And, then, he reinvented himself with low budgets, slowly garnering a bit of the respect he once had. In 2016, 16 years after the release of Unbreakable, Shyamalan released the secret sequel to that film in Split. It reignited the excitement of seeing a continuation of the Unbreakable universe.

Just two years later, we now have the arrival of Glass, which works simultaneously as a sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. It brings back Bruce Willis as David Dunn, James McAvoy as Kevin, and Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah or Mr. Glass. Almost immediately, it is evident that Shyamalan has no interest in telling a typical superhero story.

For the first few minutes we are following David, or The Overseer as he is referred to in the press, as he tracks down Kevin who has kidnapped four high school cheerleaders. When David eventually finds him, this leads to a fight and inadvertently their capture and detainment in a mental facility where Mr. Glass is being held. They are all held under close supervision by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), as she examines them under the notion that they are all just enacting their delusions of superpowers on the world. Each of the three men is held in a room that is built to trigger their weaknesses so that they can be under constant surveillance. What follows is a mental ward drama with a slowly revealed thriller that will force these three men to collide with each other.

Shyamalan is defying expectations at every turn in this film, it moves unlike anything out there, for better and for worse. He bends the genre so far into a simulacrum of reality that he drains all of the intrigue out of it. His questions about the fundamental building blocks of superhero origins is a solid start, but he labors over the course of two plus hours to try to justify the argument. Shyamalan is the type of writer that has a true gift of building a world, he just doesn’t know exactly what to do with all his action figures once he has them.

But Shyamalan is still a creative dynamo behind the camera. He understands how to establish mood as effectively as almost any director out there. He chooses, when he can, to structure the shots like panels from a comic book. It is something that he did very similarly in Unbreakable. Sometimes it is merely playing with the rule of 1/3’s and other times it is a conscious effort to block actors so that they seem caught in a frame.

At the core though, there seems to be a mechanism that keeps everything moving. A grinding towards the conclusion that feels inevitable and wildly anticlimactic. By the time the character of Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), returning from Split, is being used as a pawn to try to simmer the personalities within Kevin with her humanity, normal human emotions have been left in the dust.

The performances are all over the place, and for good reason. It is almost impossible to tell if Willis is giving a great performance, or the most lethargic of his career. I’ve long thought that James McAvoy is one of the best actors of his generation. He fits perfectly in period pieces like Atonement then he can slide into comic book fare like X-Men, and then here, he is given the longest leash of his career to create whatever insane characters he wants. In doing this though, he actually grounds all the personalities in a distinct physicality so that before he even begins talking you know which character is in charge. This is the kind of role that could’ve been unwatchable, but McAvoy gives it the kind of firm footing that this movie desperately needs. Jackson is a bit of an anchor in a way. He is giving strong work, but he is doing it in service of the other actors. It is the type of performance that makes you appreciate what a truly generous actor can do. Then there is Paulson, who is very good as the doctor, but I still can’t decide whether or not she is purposefully guiding the audience into the film’s turns.

I’ve been a bit of an apologist for Shyamalan. I think the movies of his that click are genuinely wonderful works of pop art. His stretch from The Sixth Sense to the first half of The Village, is a director in full command of his craft. And then, somewhere, somehow, ego got to him and he retreated into his own ideas so far that what came out was a type of catharsis for him, but a mental flogging for even his most devoted fans. Glass might not torture you in the ways that something like The Happening might, but it is even more depressing to see him connecting intermittently and then not being able to put these disparate puzzle pieces together.