Glass is intelligible right off the tongue: its sportnik tangents are creamed from the start, much like a sprawling sandwich spread. Its violations of rule are crafted and concealed as if to be unthreatening, like the lugubrious dens and ways of rodents, and the low-pH finesse of its unctuous, postmodern electronic asylum—including, no small success, the point-to-point predicament and verbiage of its staffage—is a capitalization on this substratum exactly, excepting, that is, from the psychiatrist, who emits a form of temporal forfeiture or limitation, the equivalent to fury, and a heartening plea respectively, both of which conspire to cave the ceiling of pervasive acumen, its devious proctological arch ranging from its mentalization of illness to the purgation of plot. Glass is death-defyingly sane, yet reveals Shyamalan’s propensity to challenge oeuvre into inflected enterprise, a feature whose substance evaporates unnervingly not only within exchanges between characters, but also in the exchanges of characters between shots, between shots between foci, etc., etc., leaving it all looking more or less intact.
Shyamalan, unfortunately, rears a racist mane—for how could such pomp be anything but—when Samuel Jackson’s character is made to locate his power, during which point the latter lends a blind nod or acquiescence to total or pervasive cognition apparent, as if to valourize and enshrine the putatively doomed, quixotic, self-recriminating, underdeveloped fate of every black inspiration, and a primary certainty of the film, quite unlike its secondary lucubration, is that this—somehow—was unintentional. It manages to turn the dyadic or dialectical hubris of small-group ventriloquism into enigmatic capitulation, into bathos and pathos—right where it belongs in reality, but not necessarily in cinema. In fact, the same psychiatrist, while she is speaking with Samuel Jackson’s dying character, comes out as a dud all on her own, exposing not really the movie, but in fact the gross Shyamalayan series for its deplorable foundation, whose characters break the mystification of failure quite a lot when they are not well-acted.
Glass is a perfect buoyant semiosis held together with mild civil survivor’s guilt, such that its perceptions are fluid, and its bones emergent as if from a fugue. Its natural confabulation is unapologetic, yet generous and successful, showing its puffy power. I keyed out, however, as soon as its scenes devolved into sub-anarchic mythemes, abutted indiscriminately by Shyamalan’s spa-like disgorgements—full of induced trances and nerdish frigidity, scathing turn-slaps and bastard reaction formations, motifs missing their limbs.
