Glass, and Reconsidering the Filmography of M. Night Shyamalan

Glass is the new film from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan and the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Unbreakable 17 years ago. That film starred Bruce Willis as David Dunn, the only survivor of a horrific train crash, and Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price, a comic book store owner who believes that both he and David have superhuman abilities. If you’re planning on seeing Glass you hopefully know all of that already. If not, take an hour and a half and catch up on one of the most underrated films of the early 2000s. In 2017 the series resumed with Split, which introduced us to Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder who cycles between 23 individual personalities. He kidnaps young women to sacrifice them to “the Beast”, the most animalistic of his identities. When he takes on this form Kevin’s body chemistry shifts and he’s able to accomplish astounding feats of strength and dexterity. Glass takes place only a few weeks later. David, now operating under the name The Overseer, is set to do battle with Kevin, whom the media has dubbed The Horde. However, Dunn’s plans to defeat Kevin are quickly thwarted by Dr. Ellie Staple, who imprisons both of them in a mental asylum. She reveals that Elijah, who calls himself Mr. Glass due to a medical condition that makes his bones exceptional fragile, is at this facility as well. Her goal is to cure all of them of their delusions and help them to realize that they are not superhuman.

It’s difficult to discuss Glass at length without spoiling much of the experience. Simply mentioning Dr. Staple and her intentions feels like a violation, despite the film’s trailers already making her presence known. This film is fascinating from a structural perspective, and the way it plays with viewer expectations is consistently impressive. Of course, that’s probably a contributing factor toward its negative reception. Unbreakable was deliberately paced and had barely any action, so expecting Glass to be an big superhero spectacle seems misguided. And yet Shyamalan knows that a portion of his audience will be expecting escalation, and at first it seems like that’s exactly what he’s going to give them. Immediately we start building to the big fight between David and Kevin, and the pacing is shockingly quick. And then all of that excitement stops dead in its tracks as Dr. Staple brings the fun superhero narrative to a crashing halt. It’s at this point that things get weird as Shyamalan reveals his true intentions.

Regardless of how you feel about the direction in which Shyamalan took these characters there’s still plenty of surface-level things to appreciate in Glass. James McAvoy was incredible in Split and he’s even better here, as he’s able to show off even more of Kevin’s personalities. In total he plays 20 characters, and each of them is as entertaining and finely etched as the last. Samuel L. Jackson does his best work since Django Unchained as Elijah, nailing the juxtaposition between his character’s physical weakness and razor-sharp mental acuity. As for Bruce Willis, I haven’t seen him put in this much effort since Looper back in 2012. He’s a subtle actor (who admittedly doesn’t have much range) and as such the differences between his depictions of David Dunn in Unbreakable and Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense may not be all that easy to pin down with words. And yet David does feel like the same character we met seventeen years ago, with Willis tapping into the same melancholy and carrying the same invisible weight on his shoulders. Glass’ composer, cinematographer and editor are all returning from their work on Split, and it’s clear that Shyamalan has established a strong team. From a technical perspective this is his strongest work since The Village. Glass’ one divisive element, and its greatest strength, is its script.

In some ways Glass is a deconstruction of comic book movies, as well as the people who love them. Shyamalan plays with story conventions, flipping around the typical beats and turning them inside-out. As such we begin to question much of what we’ve come to know about these characters and the world they inhabit.The film is full of familiar setups with odd, unexpected punchlines. For some this process will be infuriating. It’s a little like finding a slice of dragonfruit in your ham and cheese sandwich: either you’ll be delighted by the presence of something exotic and unexpected in a familiar framework or you’ll be annoyed that your sandwich tastes different and think the chef’s a little big for his britches. Either way you’ll be having some emotions about that sandwich. This all might sound like Shyamalan is mocking superhero fans or making some statement about how comic book movies have become stale, but fear not. If you’ve seen Unbreakable then you know that Shyamalan loves superheroes. He’s fascinated by the mythology of comic lore and finds their subjects inspiring. Do you remember how throughout Unbreakable Elijah kept making all of those weird meta-references to how he and David Dunn were a superhero and a supervillain playing out a comic book narrative? Get ready for more of that, on an even grander scale. Of course, some viewers will compare the film to Unbreakable not based upon its actual attributes but some gilded, nostalgic memory.

Glass’ main enemy is expectation. Fans have been clamoring for a sequel to Unbreakable since it came out. There was so much potential there, and so much that was left unexplored. WIth no promise of a second film on the horizon many fans likely spent the ensuing years imagining where they would have taken the story. I did as well. Let me be clear about this: Glass is NOT the ending that you’ve imagined. None of us could have ever predicted the things that Shyamalan did with this story. For me, that experience was exhilarating, but I can see why some people are disappointed. Shyamalan has been very clear about Glass not being the start of something bigger. It’s an ending, and he must have known that the way he concluded the arcs of these characters would be controversial. I feel that most of the hate for this film has been centered around its third act. I’d love to talk about the film’s ending and how it recontextualizes and deepens the entire experience. I didn’t even understand why this movie was called Glass until the last five minutes, but after seeing them I think the title is perfect. If you’ve seen the movie yourself then maybe you know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’re just angry that Blank blanked in a blank. I get that too, even if I’m not.

So does this movie have flaws? Of course. The script is far from ironclad. For example, it annoyed me that the Overseer hid his face by constantly turning out lights. It’s cool in the moment, but if you stop and ponder the logistics it gets a little goofy. Does he only stop crimes in areas where light switches are readily accessible? Does he just not battle crime during the day? Why doesn’t he just buy a mask? And there’s a part where a certain character is flummoxed by flashing lights and he never thinks to close his eyes or cover them with his shirt. It’d at least be worth a try… And there’s one part where Blank steals a blank from the blank, and I never completely understood what the blank did and how its absence changed what ultimately happened to Blank. These are all minor complaints, and they’re basically the only issues I had with the film. Some of the dialogue is awkward, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point. Shyamalan’s cameo is bizarre, but that only made me love it more. In short, it’s flawed, just like all of Shyamalan’s films, but it’s so strange and entertaining that I found myself not caring in the least.

By this point it should be clear that I’m a fan of the guy’s work, but that wasn’t always the case. I, like many others, wrote Shyamalan off some fifteen years ago, to the point where I wasn’t even sure I was interested in seeing The Visit in 2015. That movie reawakened my love of his early work, the stuff I’d always enjoyed, but Glass did something different. It made me think about his filmography in a different, and much more forgiving, way. For those who would like to stick around, bearing in mind that the proper review is now unceremoniously over, I’d like to go into some detail in illustrating what watching Glass did to my brain. And if you want to stop here, here’s a brief final analysis: I like Glass a lot, and I get why maybe you don’t.

You probably know the story, though I’ll recount it here quickly: The Sixth Sense served as Shyamalan’s de facto debut, though he’d made two other films already. The project received near unanimous accolation, including six Academy Award nominations and a place on the American FIlm Institute’s list of the top 100 films of all time (where it currently sits at #89). The two films that followed, Unbreakable and Signs, were also acclaimed but to a lesser degree, with mixed reviews that skewed positive. With the release of The Village Shyamalan’s career entered freefall, with every film he released between 2004 and 2010 receiving an increasingly negative reception. This backlash culminated in the writer/director abandoning personal projects like Lady in the Water and The Happening to become a hired gun on the abysmally received films The Last Airbender and After Earth. And then, just when it seemed like the film industry had written him off entirely, Shyamalan returned with The Visit and Split, works which brought him his most positive reviews in thirteen years and earned back the audience he’d need to make a larger film like Glass profitable. The stage was set for a victorious moment, but things didn’t quite work out that way. The box office returns were solid but fan reaction was mixed, and the critics tore it apart.

It’s hard to argue with the overall quality of The Sixth Sense. It’s a well-written film with exceptional performances and an impressive command of craft. That being said, I do feel that the film has been overhyped; and I believe that this overhyping has lead to many of Shyamalan’s subsequent films being underrated or misunderstood. It is Shyamalan’s most consistent work, but also his least characteristic. It is far more serious and straightforward than any other screenplay he’s composed, and as an introduction to his work it was very misleading. Of course, we only know that through hindsight. It was reasonable for critics at the time to expect another film with a similar feel. However, it’s not reasonable for them to expect that now, and many still seem to. Watching Glass made me want to go back and watch the films Shyamalan released between 2004 and 2010 again and consider them without the influence all of that backlash, removed as much as possible from their historical context. It made me wonder if I might appreciate The VIllage, Lady in the Water and The Happening more now that I know what kind of a writer Shyamalan really is.

One of my favorite scenes in Shyamalan’s entire oeuvre is the dinner scene from Signs, where Mel Gibson cooks all of his family’s favorite foods so that they can enjoy a final meal together before they’re murdered by aliens. Watching Gibson weep while eating mashed potatoes is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, and it’s these kind of moments I treasure most from Shyamalan’s films. Like that weird scene from Unbreakable where David’s son threatens to shoot him to see if the bullet will bounce off; or The Visit’s stunning game of Yahtzee. These are the kinds of moments that only Shyamalan can write. They are profoundly strange, contradictory, funny, unsettling and, most importantly, unique. The first time I saw The Visit it felt like it was written in a moment of self-reflection, with Shyamalan acknowledging the absurdities that were always present in his writing and using them to his advantage. But what if he was even more self-aware than I gave him credit for? After his film The Happening was released to scathing reviews Shyamalan said that it was meant to be a comedy, a loving tribute to the cheesy sci-fi thrilers of the 50s. He compared it to The Blob, though I think of it more as a modern Day of the Triffids. At the time I wrote this off as a dodge, an excuse for his ineptitude. But, in the wake of his more overtly comedic work, I think it might be true.

What if Lady in the Water and The Happening are as ridiculous as they are not because of the incompetence of a very competent writer/director but because they were flawed blueprints for his current work, with its impressive blend of comedy and darkness? Shyamalan himself admitted that The Happening didn’t read as a comedy because his direction was “inconsistent,” playing some parts as parody and some as straightforward horror without finding a good balance. He’s right: it’s a tonal mess. This is also an issue I have with Lady in the Water, which ping-pongs between emotional palates with seemingly little regard for how once scene should build off another. Yet The Visit and Split are also tonally inconsistent, but in a completely different way. They use their disorienting blend of horror and comedy to throw the viewer off balance, to make their horrific events seem even more surreal. In the end, are The Visit and The Happening really all that different from a tonal perspective? Is their style of humor all that disparate? And if not, why does one work so much better than the other?

After The Sixth Sense Shyamalan was noted as an important filmmaker, the next Spielberg, and he almost certainly felt a pressure to keep making important work. If you watch old Shyamalan interviews from before his comeback you’ll see him defensively refer to goofy moments and weak filmmaking as bits of bold artistry. He was always funny, but he wasn’t ready to be. He was a serious artist, and as such his films were meant to be taken seriously. There’s a certain amount of egotism there, even moments of outright denial. Lady in the Water doesn’t come together like it should because it’s trying to be a quirky little family comedy/fantasy movie and the most important, life-affirming film of Shyamalan’s career all at once. That was the kind of unfortunate duality that most of his films possessed. Even when he went small, he had to go big. In contrast, The Visit is a small film, in both conception and execution, and it’s all the better for it. Movies don’t have to make people cry or change their lives forever to be artistically valid. Laughter is just as impactful, and significant, as tears. It seemed to me as if a decade of failure had humbled Shyamalan and given him a new, healthier perspective. And then I saw the final scene of Split, which raised some red flags.

I love the ending of Split, but it is not a good ending. I am a huge Unbreakable fan and, as such, seeing Bruce Willis as David Dunn on screen again obliterated my brain. I couldn’t process my excitement. I just sat there in the theater saying “WHAT?” a lot, trying to remember how language worked. But then I thought about all the people in that theater who hadn’t seen Unbreakable. Bear in mind, this this wasn’t some easter egg after the credits, like that super-confusing final scene in X-Men: Apocalypse. This was the actual ending of the film, the most important part. Not only would these people be confused, they would have also missed out on much what made the movie special. The first time you watch Split it’s about how Dissociative Identity Disorder allows you to climb on walls and absorb bullets, and it’s a little much, kinda like if Silence of the Lambs had ended with Hannibal Lecter transforming into a sheep. However, once you know that the film takes place in the Unbreakable universe it becomes a supervillain origin story and the whole thing works. This film isn’t set in our reality, where mental health issues can’t make you bulletproof, but in a universe where superhumans already exist. You need to understand that to appreciate the movie in full. The big issue here is that Unbreakable wasn’t a very popular film. It did well at the box office, more than tripling its budget, but it made about a third of what The Sixth Sense did.The fact that Shyamalan would endanger the ending of Split, his most crowd-pleasing film in years, by assuming that the average moviegoer would know a character from a film released seventeen years earlier that got mediocre reviews and disappointing box office returns struck me as wildly egotistical at the time. I can still see that perspective, but now I’ve realized that there’s another potential culprit: idealism.

Shyamalan has always struck me as a very idealistic guy. He likes to write stories about the human spirit triumphing over adversity, the powerful bond shared by families and communities and, perhaps most significantly, faith. Shyaman writes about faith a lot, typically about its power to inspire or build connection. This is most obvious in Signs, which is literally about a priest learning to believe in God again, but it’s present in most of his films. One of the main complaints I hear about Lady in the Water is that Paul Giamatti’s protagonist starts telling all of these people this crazy story about how he has to protect a Narf from a Scrunt so that she can ride the Great Eatlon back to the Blue World and they all just believe him. Some of them know about it already, before he even mentions it. But is that mindset really so alien? The story of the Narf is passed down from generation to generation, unwritten until the events of the film (with Shyamalan casting himself as Moses), all of it based on ancient stories that none of these people could have experienced firsthand. These people believe in the Narf and the Scrunt and the Blue World not because they have physical evidence that everything Paul Giamatti is saying is true (which they don’t until the ending of the movie), but because they have faith. These themes weren’t addressed explicitly in either The Visit or Split, not that I noticed anyway, but they are very present in Glass, and even as a non-religious person I found them inspiring.

Glass is about a different sort of faith, one that’s not blatantly religious. It’s about faith in oneself, and about the potential of humanity in general,The characters in Glass believe that they are special, and most of the film is spent trying to convince them that they are not. Dr. Staple’s mission is to cure these three men of their “delusions.” David and Kevin are not unique, they have no grand purpose, they are simply mentally ill men with unusually high upper body strength. Most of the film’s conflict is not The Horde vs The Overseer, it’s David and Kevin vs their own insecurities. I won’t tell you whether or not their faith in themselves is in vain, though if you’ve seen a Shyamalan film before you might be able to guess. That being said, Shyamalan has never shied away from the darker aspects of faith. The Happening is essentially about a plague, with mankind being punished for its reckless attitude towards the environment, while The Village is seemingly about how people can use their beliefs to deny their hardships and exist in a state of comforting denial. In Unbreakable Mr. Glass’ faith in his own superintelligence ends up leading to deaths of a whole commuter train full of people. However, Glass’ message is ultimately one of hope. All of us have the capacity to do remarkable things (whether they be heroic or horrible) if we are able to let go of our insecurities and fears, and keep out the voices who try to keep us categorized and quiet. In fact, Glass might be the most optimistic film that Shyamalan has ever made, and that makes me happy.

So, will you like Glass as much as I did? Probably not, judging from the average fan reaction. You’ll probably be disappointed at where the film leaves these characters and how it plays with seventeen years of fan expectation. You might even feel a little bit betrayed, much like Star Wars fans did when The Last Jedi revealed that Luke was all pissed off now. However, I love it when a film can genuinely surprise me, and for all of its weirdness Glass is very consistent with the world of the previous films in the series. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the movie is that it feels like a genuine merger between Unbreakable and Split, films which are very different tonally. Neither side of the equation cancels out there other because Dr. Staple and Elijah act as intermediaries, forcing these disparate elements to coexist as one cohesive whole. In fact, it’s almost like Dr. Staple is “stapling” the two films together, and now I’m wondering if that was intentional or if I’m just a moron. Regardless, Glass is an intriguing piece of work, and if you go into it with the right expectations and an open mind you might walk away impressed. As for me, I think I’m gonna be re-watching Lady in the Water and The Happening some time soon.