Glasshouse Review: Dreamy Sci-Fi Proves Restraint Does Well In The Apocalypse
About two and a half years into a global pandemic, many individuals are still having trouble figuring out what they remember or what some people are choosing to forget. Memory is a complicated thing. The value of memory and what use it serves when it becomes useless to most people and precious to a very small number are both raised in the film Glasshouse, which is about a pandemic that affects memory and is referred to as "the shred." Glasshouse demonstrates that restraint works well for the apocalypse, and even though the outcome seems somewhat inevitable, there is beauty in it anyway. It is emphasised by a macabre sweetness that is rotting by the botanical hothouse it is set in.
Evie (Anja Taljaard), Bee (Jessica Alexander), and daisy (Kitty Harris) are three sisters who live in the titular house with Mother (Adrienne Pearce) and their shred-addled brother Gabe (Brent Vermeulen), free from the airborne toxin that taints people's memories and transforms them into mindless predators. The family tends to their garden as they wait for their brother Luca, who left them when he was just a teenager, to return. They kill anyone who approaches their haven, eating the best parts and using the rest of their bodies as deterrents to other intruders. Their lives are upset by the new addition, who oddly seems unaffected by the tragedy, when an injured guy (Hilton Pelser) enters their tiny Eden. Could it be Luca, who has finally made it back to the sanctuary, or is it simply a random stranger, sent by the outside world to sabotage what little tranquilly they have managed to create in their seclusion?
Glasshouse most prominently reminds viewers of The Beguiled, which Clint Eastwood first adapted for the big screen in 1971 and Sofia Coppola remade in 2017. Despite early glimpses of chopped limbs and foot-long scars sewn up by thread, there is a sense of restraint in Glasshouse, from the Victorian clothing to the Edenic-like environs (what they term the sanctuary). When the stranger shows up and catches the attention of the two eldest daughters, this constraint gives way to a low-key dread. The only green space within three days' walk, according to the injured stranger, is where viewers will spend the next hour and a half, according to director Kelsey Egan, who also co-wrote the story with Emma Lungiswa de Wet.