GLASS: MORE TWISTS THAN A FUNHOUSE MIRROR

Superhero, villain, mastermind: all connected in GLASS

The villainous mastermind of M. Night Shyamalan’s horror/thriller/fantasy trilogy that ends with the film GLASS (in theaters now) has a theory about superheroes and their evil counterparts. 

Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), believes the supernatural heroes and villains of comic book fame are real, created by extraordinary events or challenges in people’s lives. He has made it his life’s work to prove this theory, even if it means he must manipulate the lives of others as part of his Grand Experiment. Just how far he’s been willing to go in his experimentation becomes chillingly clear in this last film of Shyamalan’s cinematic triptych.

The SIXTH SENSE director began this journey with UNBREAKABLE (2000), the story of reluctant superhero David Dunn, able to sense evil in others with a touch and invulnerable to every weakness except water. Dunn, you see, acquired his superpowers by surviving a drowning by bullies as a child. He only begins to understand who and what he is after he finds himself the sole survivor of a train wreck years later. He meets Price, a comic book collector who suffers from a congenital defect called osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. 

The two men are, in effect, “broken” vs. “unbreakable,” and Price believes they are destined to be arch-enemies, struggling for the soul of the world. Dunn wins their first film encounter, and we, the audience, are supposed to believe that’s that.

The second film in the series, SPLIT (2016), stars James McAvoy in an acting tour-de-force as a serial killer with multiple personality disorder. One of Kevin Wendell Crumb’s 24 personalities is Hedwig, a nine-year-old boy, the age when, not uncoincidentally, Kevin’s disturbed mother started abusing him as a child. Another is The Beast, the supernaturally strong creature that actually does the killing, aided by certain other members of what Kevin refers to as The Horde of personalities.

One of the teenage girls The Horde kidnaps in SPLIT forms a tenuous connection with the gentler “Kevin” persona and is allowed to live. Casey is eventually rescued, though The Horde escapes, and a final scene in the film refers us back to both David Dunn and Elijah Price from UNBREAKABLE.

Which brings us to the final chapter in GLASS. Dunn is still cruising the streets to identify evil-doers and bring them to justice, though he is trying to maintain a low profile. No bright cape, no tights, and certainly no headlines for this guy, just an old rain poncho (water is his Kryptonite, remember?). His son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark from UNBREAKABLE) is grown now and pushing him to do more. Price is confined to a mental hospital, heavily sedated for everyone’s good.

The Horde, however, is up to its old tricks, kidnapping young girls and chaining them to pipes in an abandoned factory in Philly. Dunn finds them and rescues them, but things take a turn when both The Beast and our superhero are trapped by police mid-fight outside the factory and hauled off to the same asylum where Price is imprisoned. Seems there is an impassioned young psychiatrist (Sarah Paulson) with new technology and new methodology who is out to convince villains and superheroes alike there are no such thing as superpowers.

She almost convinces us, too. But, then, we know the Elijah Price (that’s “first name Mr., last name Glass”) who’s slumped drooling in that wheelchair is hiding something, don’t we? Turns out his machinations have deeper implications that anyone could have predicted, for everyone involved.

There are more twists and turns in this plot than a North Carolina scenic byway, so the ending of GLASS doesn’t disappoint. I can only hope it doesn’t take Shyamalan another three years (much less the16 years between UNBREAKABLE AND SPLIT) to take up the storyline from where he left it. Because, as Elijah explains to his long-suffering mother, “No, Mama! This wasn’t a showdown! It was an origin story all along!”

(GLASS is definitely a GO, even if you missed the earlier two films. It’s not gory or nightmare-inducing, but it will make you think. Well worth it just to see Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy chew the scenery, though Bruce Willis could have been given more to do.)

Cheers, Donna