In short: Glass (2018)

Warning: I’ll spoil some elements of the film; I’d argue there’s not much to actually spoil here, though, for the idea of spoilers does suggest the existence of dramatic tension to be spoiled.

After the nearly good Split, I, the eternal optimist, was hoping its sequel, Glass, might just be that curious beast – a second M. Night Shyamalan movie making good on the great genre director The Sixth Sense had once promised.

What I then watched was pretty much the opposite: a slow and tedious crawl playing out like a bad bottle episode of a TV show that takes more than two hours to get through what’s at best a thirty minute plot (which often seems barely to exist at all anyway). You’d hope the film would at least enhance this non-experience via the mysterious arts of characterisation and mood-building, but the little personality anyone on screen shows belongs to a cast just a little too good to feel quite as empty as they are written. Why you’d cast Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis and then have them proceed to basically do no acting whatsoever, or why you’d let James McAvoy double down on his obnoxious performance in the first movie is anyone’s guess. But then, this one was written by someone (cough) who seems to believe he is - in a superhero movie in 2018 - doing something cleverly deconstructive by pointing out tropes the audience by now knows quite well from film where things are actually happening to keep them from falling asleep, and by doing a plot twist (that’s barely even a twitch) that consists of the film saying “Gotcha! You thought it was this standard ending trope! Instead I’m using this different yet even more standard ending trope! And I’m doing it as slowly and dramatically awkward as possible”!


Dramatically awkward is the watchword for the whole film. Glass is full of scenes that are slow (so slow) while having no apparent function in the narrative at all, going on for what feels like an eternity, pretending to do something immensely deep and clever the audience needs time to grasp while actually presenting not much at all. It doesn’t help here that Shyamalan seems to have lost every bit of dramatic instinct he once had. Take the triple “tragic” death scene before the end that gives two of the main characters and about a hundred of McAvoy’s personalities and their respective supporting characters way too much time to die (oh so slowly), drawing things out until even the last possibility of reacting to this nonsense with anything but laughter or eye-rolling disappears. I honestly have no idea what the filmmaker was thinking with these scenes. But then, I have no idea what he was thinking with the rest of the movie either.

Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.

In short: Bird Box (2018)

To nobody’s surprise, it’s the end of the world again. This time around, some apparently rather terrifying things are racing around the world driving most people who see them to suicide. We will later learn that they also drive a small number of people into hunting down the people who somehow have avoided looking at them. Because being down on the mentally ill is always okay (he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm), the film also suggests it is people with mental illnesses thusly susceptible.

We learn all this via flashbacks while following a woman named Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and two little kids apparently named Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) on a blindfolded voyage down a river towards what may or may not be our usual post-apocalyptic sanctuary. So when we don’t have dramatic boating adventures, we witness how the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors (including Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Jacki Weaver) get slowly whittled down to the trio we are flashbacking from.

Turns out, Netflix can make this sort of “serious” Hollywood genre fare as well as the major studios, ending up with a film so riskless and obvious, yet technically very competent, it would have been the lone Oscar nominated movie a couple of years ago, before the Academy realized you might as well nominate good and interesting films beside those trying to be “worthy”. One of the best things among many wonderful things about Black Panther is that it’s not a film designed for Academy nods.

Don’t let my somewhat disgusted tone steer you wrong: director Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic horror film is in all regards perfectly decent or better, and absolutely worth a watch. She’s certainly a very competent filmmaker, and I’d love to see something by her with a more ambitious script. What we get instead is Eric Heisserer using the perfectly wonderful and weird basic idea of the apocalypse from Josh Malerman’s novel for a post-apocalypse by numbers film, with characters only more lively than stock because the cast is really rather good (even Bullock does great work, especially for a woman who can’t move half of her face anymore), and so full of aggressive attempts to make its audience feel feelings I found myself less moved the more the film went out of its way to touch me.

That last aspect of the film is not at all improved by the its treatment of Bullock’s character arc. Not terribly great parenting has apparently caused her to be so emotionally distanced she can’t even (gasp!) look forward to having a child; fortunately, the apocalypse comes along and teaches her the value of motherhood and not giving your children names like “Boy” and “Girl”. The ending’s pretty ridiculous too, with a pat little happy end that fits not at all into what we’ve seen before. Does she name the children when she arrives in Happyland? You betcha! The Babadook, this certainly isn’t.


But honestly, Bird Box is a perfectly watchable, extremely well made film, with a couple of fine suspense sequences, it’s just annoying me righteously with all its gesturing towards a supposed depth it doesn’t actually have.