Glasshouse (2021)

Film review #686

Director: Kelsey Egan

SYNOPSIS: As a airborne disease known as The Shred has permeated Earth’s atmosphere and wiped people’s memories, a small family have taken refuge in a glass house. Their ritualistic existence is interrupted when a stranger arrives and is brought into the house…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Glasshouse is a 2016 South African sci-fi film. It is set in a world where an airborne disease known only as The Shred causes people to lose their memories. In a glass house protected from the outside a family of women with, but their somewhat idyllic existence is shattered when an injured man is brought into the home, and their lives begin to unravel. The premise is simple enough to get, but it is extremely slow going: the plot unfolds at a snail’s pace as the new arrival starts to upset the balance between the residents. There’s some intrigue, mystery and drama here, but my main issue is that this is one of those films I just don’t like: where one person shows up and just gaslights and manipulates everyone else and we can only look on as everyone falls for it. You can certainly make these kinds of films work, but the way Glasshouse goes about it leaves a lot to be desired: it uses a lot of very typical beats to drive things forward, including just using sex as a manipulative tool, which honestly just feels like it has been done so many times before, and there’s nothing else to really make it stand out.

The plot revolves a lot around memory and remembering, but this evolves to such a point that the characters can no longer trust their memory, or if they have been exposed to The Shred. This invites a host of inconsistencies that are never really addressed; it eventually becomes a case of dismissing these plot holes and questions as just a case of bad memory, and this carries on into the conclusion that offers very little. The characters are fairly well defined and play their roles well, but the character of Luca (the man who is brought into the house) just remains an inscrutable mystery regarding his motives. It seems because he is immune to The Shred that he turns up to the house from time to time when no one remembers who he is to just manipulate everyone and continue the cycle of causing trauma and making them forget. The film tries to tie it up at the end, but it just doesn’t work: any time there’s an attempt to tie things up or be poetic, it just falls a bit flat. With all that said, the film does linger a bit after watching it with all the mystery it raises; it’s just that it thinking about it never leads anywhere. I’m sure Glasshouse has an audience for it’s drama and ambiguity, but the slow pacing, tired plot devices, and gaping plot holes combined with an inability to construct any depth means that the whole experience is a struggle.