Glass

★★★

It’s the trilogy no one saw coming, or ever even knew they really wanted. M Night Shyamalan — a director widely-derided for the critical/artistic nosedive he took, in going from The Sixth Sense to disasters like Lady In The Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth — has spun two of his most-acclaimed past pictures, 2000’s Unbreakable and 2016’s Split, into a unifying third, Glass. They aren’t a straight trilogy, more a trio of related pictures; behold, I guess, the MNSCU.

When Unbreakable arrived, in a world that’d just survived the Y2K, its serious, sober meditations on the pulpy tropes of comic-books were unexpected; considering comics as a literary body-of-work something that hadn’t, yet, been turned into its own pulpy trope. Glass picks up on the same themes, but can’t help but feel a little late to the party; in an era of meta-comic-book deconstructions like Deadpool and Into The Spider-verse, having Samuel L Jackson speak aloud narrative devices as they’re happening no longer feels like incisive commentary or self-aware mea culpa.

Glass reunites Unbreakable’s protagonist (Bruce Willis’s sad-dad, who survived a fatal train-crash unharmed) and antagonist (Jackson’s brittle-boned comic-book obsessive, who masterminded said fatal train-crash in hopes of proving superpowers are real). And, to the mix it adds the lead from the ridiculous, loopy Split, James McAvoy’s comically-schizophrenic villain, whose ‘Horde’ of competing multiple-personalities include the animalistic, superhuman Beast, whom the other personalities have taken to worshipping; superhero tales ones where the alpha male always ascends above the rest.

The performances of these leading men vary wildly; suggest, indeed, the cinematic mash-up at hand. McAvoy, essentially playing out an actor’s workshop fantasy, is clearly having a blast as he cycles through an unending range of personas, conveying them all through turns of voice and posture. Willis, as is often the case in his recent work, feels like he’s cashing a pay cheque, sleepwalking through scenes in a performance equal parts underplayed and disinterested. Jackson spans the gamut between the two: his collector, on introduction, is in some seemingly-catatonic state, silent and un-moving; but, by the film’s end, he’s burst back to villainous life, holding court in that booming, stentorian Jacksonist fashion.

The three are brought together in a shadowy, seemingly-understaffed mental asylum; their long-awaited, crossover-achieving meeting coming in a gloriously candy-pink room. They’ve been gathered by Sarah Paulson’s doctor, whose life is devoted to studying people who have the grand delusion that they have special powers, sufferers of some sort of superhero syndrome.

The exchanges between doctor and patients are shot to-camera, with full ‘frontality’, actors looking down the barrel, engaging audiences with their gaze. It’s a form of confrontation that makes us complicit in this interrogation; Paulson’s dismissal of those who live for comic-book tropes —as dangerous delusion, coping mechanism, and something needing to be ‘cured’— feeling as if an attempt to engage in a greater conversation, questioning why the superhero flick has become the dominant cinematic product, the definitive tales of our troubled times.

Glass is both a participant in the Superhero-Universe-Building Industrial Complex and something that sits outside of it. Stylistically, Shyamalan’s particular predilections —the influence of Spielberg, Hitchcock, old gothic horrors, and B-movies— are far more classicist than the cacophonous modern blockbuster, with its outsourced action-sequences and CGI pixel-pushing. Most of the film is housed in a singular location, the framing is carefully composed, and any use of digital effects is minimal (which is welcome, given how aggressively-awful both The Last Airbender and After Earth looked). Shyamalan employs colour in a way no army of CGI-technicians ever would: his three principles dressed in singular shades (yellow, green, and purple), his spaces, like that candy-pink room, feeling like stark canvases; this primarly-colouring evoking not just the simple printing of comic-book panels, but the employed use of signifying colour by old auteurs. There’s also that classic trope of cinematic psychological studies: endless use of reflective surfaces, mirrors suggesting both doubles and the need for self-examination.

Of course, Shyamalan is a filmmaker forever in need of self-examination. Glass shows him, again, to be a great director and a so-so writer. From scene to scene, the main feeling is of the gears turning. His characters are rarely complex, and the regular-human support-players —Willis’s son (Spencer Treat Clark), Jackson’s mother (Charlayne Woodard), McAvoy’s ostensible love-interest (Anya Taylor-Joy) — are left two-dimensional, literally cheering and offering commentary from the sidelines. And looming, of course, is the inevitable twist; though, upping the ante, here Shyamalan delivers two.

The fact that Unbreakable spawned this sequel feels like its own twist, a development no one who saw The Last Airbender saw coming. But, the ultimate failing of this sometimes-impressive film is that it picks up, a little too much, from where the last film philosophically left off. Glass doesn’t acknowledge how much the landscape has changed in that two-decade interim; taking place in its own cloistered, self-contained world, where ‘comics’ are still a cult concern consigned to basement stores and nerdy collectors, not the predominant global pop-cultural paradigm. This means that, for as much as it questions these stories, Glass doesn’t really take in the scope of its own themes.